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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Kty 3Soi)Icn ILcctures, 1882 



THE 



RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY 



TO 



CIVIL SOCIETY 



BY 



SAMUEL SMITH HARRIS, D.D., LL.D. 

aStsfjop of iflfttrfjtgan 



DELIVERED IN THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, 
PHILADELPHIA, IN ADVENT, 1882 



NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 
1883 







r 



Copyright, 1883, 
By THOMAS WHITTAKER. 



Jfranklm $reas : 

RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, 
BOSTON. 



THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP. 



John Bohlen, who died in this city on the twenty-sixth 
day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of One 
Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be distributed to religious 
and charitable objects in accordance with the well-known 
wishes of the testator. 

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trus- 
tees, under the will of Mr. Bohlen, transferred and paid 
over to " The Rector, Church Wardens, and Vestrymen 
of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia," in 
trust, a sum of money for certain designated purposes, 
out of which fund the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars was 
set apart for the endowment of The John Bohlen Lec- 
tureship, upon the following terms and conditions : — 

"The money shall be invested in good, substantial, and safe 
securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called The John 
Bohlen Lectureship ; and the income shall be applied annually to 
the payment of a qualified person, whether clergyman or layman, 
for the delivery and publication of at least one hundred copies of 
two or more lecture sermons. These lectures shall be delivered 
at such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the persons 

3 



The John Bohlen Lectureship. 



nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from time to time deter- 
mine, giving at least six-months' notice to the person appointed to 
deliver the same, when the same may conveniently be done, and 
in no case selecting the same person as lecturer a second time 
within a period of five years. The payment shall be made to said 
lecturer, after the lectures have been printed, and received by the 
trustees, of all the income for the year derived from said fund, 
after defraying the expense of printing the lectures, and the other 
incidental expenses attending the same. 

"The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the 
terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton, for the de- 
livery of what are known as the ' Bampton Lectures,' at Oxford, 
or any other subject distinctively connected with or relating to the 
Christian Religion. 

" The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of 
May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done, by the 
persons who for the time being shall hold the offices of Bishop of 
the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese in which is the 
Church of the Holy Trinity; the Rector of said Church; the Pro- 
fessor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, 
and the Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School 
of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. 

" In case either of said offices are vacant, the others may nomi- 
nate the lecturer." 

Under this trust the Right Reverend Samuel Smith 
Harris, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of the Diocese of Michi- 
gan, was appointed to deliver the lectures for the year 
1882. 

Philadelphia, Advent, 1882. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

The Question Stated 9 

" Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might 
entangle him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their disci- 
ples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art 
true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for 
any man : for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us 
therefore, What thinkest thou ? Is it lawful to give tribute unto 

Caesar, or not?" 

St. Matthew xxii. 15-17. 

LECTURE II. 

The Answer of Christ, and the Developments of 

European History 37 

"But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye 
me, ye hypocrites ? Shew me the tribute money. And they 
brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this 
image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar's. Then 
saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which 
are Caesar's ; and unto God the things that are God's." 

St. Matthew xxii. 18-21. 

LECTURE III. 

The Answer of Christ, and the Developments of 
American History ....... 79 

"If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend." 

St. John xix. 12. 
5 



6 Contents. 

LECTURE IV. 

PAGE 

Education 123 

u And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is 
given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach 
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the 
Son, and of the Holy Ghost : teaching them to observe all things 
whatsoever I have commanded you : and, lo, I am with you alway, 
even unto the end of the world." 

St. Matthew xxviii. 18-20. 

LECTURE V. 

Charity • . 159 

" For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will 
ye may do them good." 

St. Mark xiv. 7. 

LECTURE VI. 

The Ultimate Issue 199 

" Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus 
answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, 
and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness 
unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." 

St. John xviii. 37. 



LECTURE I. 

THE QUESTION STATED. 



THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANITY 



TO 



CIVIL SOCIETY 



LECTURE I. 

THE QUESTION STATED. 

M Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle 
him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Hero- 
dians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way 
of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man : for thou regardest not 
the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou ? Is it lawful 
to give tribute unto Caesar, or not ? " — St. Matthew xxii. 15-17. 

TN this passage we are told under what circum- 
-*- stances and with what design the question 
which is now to engage our thought was first 
proposed to the Founder of Christianity. No 
doubt the inquiry which the Pharisees and Hero- 
dians made was not only disingenuous, but was 
far more limited in its intent than ours must be. 
Their purpose was to betray Jesus into one of 

9 



IO The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

two alternative dangers in defining the attitude 
of what they regarded as a Jewish religious cult, 
toward a government that was at once foreign 
and despotic. Yet, whatever their purpose was, 
the formal reason upon which they proceeded was 
the obvious need that there should be some 
authoritative definition of the relation which Jesus 
intended should subsist between his teaching and 
the requirements of the existing government or 
civil society. That such a question should be 
propounded in some form was, indeed, inevitable. 
In the midst of the antagonisms, open and con- 
cealed, which agitated that restless age, neutrality 
in such a matter was believed to be impossible. 
Especially, for reasons which must hereafter 
engage our attention, the assumption of such 
neutrality would have been resented as quite 
intolerable in one who, like Jesus, claimed to be 
the anointed Prince of the house of David. 

We shall have occasion hereafter to consider 
the answer which Jesus returned to his interloc- 
utors, and we shall then see that such answer was 
not less complete than it was unexpected a.nd 
surprising. For the present it may suffice to 
point out, in passing, that it disclosed a relation 



I.] To Civil Society. 1 1 

between Christianity and civil society which 
could hardly fail to be unsatisfactory to all parties 
in that day. To the secularist Herodian, not less 
than to the theocratic Pharisee, it indicated a 
modus vivendi between civil and ecclesiastical 
authority that appeared to be both unintelligible 
and intolerable. The antagonism between the 
two opposing ideas which they represented is not 
yet extinct, nor has the world yet learned alto- 
gether to accept the marvellous reconciliation of 
it that is implied in the answer of Jesus. For 
more than eighteen centuries of Christian history, 
grave problems of civil allegiance and social order 
have emerged along the line of the great move- 
ment which he instituted ; and prophets and 
statesmen are still trying to find the principle 
which shall effect a final solution of them. I 
believe that the search need not be abandoned as 
unavailing. I believe that the Founder of Chris- 
tianity himself laid down the principle which the 
world has so long been seeking, and that a rever- 
ent and humble search for it now will not be 
wholly unrewarded. With unfeigned humility I 
venture to-night to renew the attempt to discover 
and formulate that principle; believing that, upon 



12 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

its acknowledgment, the civil and religious well- 
being of our fellow-countrymen largely depends, 
and that we must look to the recognition of it for 
the development of a genuine Christian states- 
manship in our land. 

It is my purpose, however, to postpone to the 
second lecture of this series, the consideration of 
the teaching of Jesus on this subject, and to at- 
tempt in this preliminary lecture to define the 
philosophical basis upon which our inquiry is to 
rest. If any justification is needed for the more 
extended demand which this method will make 
upon our attention, it will be found, I venture to 
think, in the essential importance of our inquiry, 
and in the peculiar circumstances of the age, 
which make it both practical and timely. No 
discussion of such a subject can be of value that 
does not proceed from a philosophical basis ; 
that is to say, from a basis or first principle that 
shall be, not merely indicated by authority, but 
established by reason. It is well seen, that the 
gravest interests, both of politics and religion, are 
awaiting at this moment the discovery of some 
middle ground, where they may be reconciled and 
harmonized. Such burning questions as those 



I.] To Civil Society. 13 

relating to religious and secular education, to labor 
and capital, to the standard of public morality, 
to the administration of justice and charity, — 
such are the questions that are standing in the 
outer court of our forum ; and, if we are to try 
them, we must, first of all, establish some common 
philosophical ground where all the contesting in- 
terests may meet on equal terms. I believe that 
the solution of all these questions will be found 
in the recognition of the true relation between 
Christianity and civil society, and in the free 
action of each upon the other in that relation. 
But then we must, first of all, make up the 
pleadings, as the lawyers would say ; that is to 
say, we must allow each side to tell its own story. 
We must first understand what civil society is, from 
a purely political stand-point, just as we shall insist 
on defining Christianity from a purely religious 
stand-point ; and then we shall endeavor to indi- 
cate the relation between them. 

First, then, we must determine the fundamental 
question, What is the State? — what is the philo- 
sophical basis of civil society ? To this question 
there have been various answers. Considered in 
its relation to the Church, some of these answers 



14 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

have emerged in history as the characteristic 
views of ecclesiastical or political parties. For 
instance, the Papist would define the State as a 
creature of the Church; the Erastian would make 
the Church a department of the State ; the Puri- 
tan would regulate the State on Church ideas ; 
the Hobbist would rule the Church on reasons of 
State ; the Quaker would abolish Church organ- 
ization ; and the Mennonite would suppress the 
office of the civil magistrate. 1 All these views 
are held in our own land and age, and we shall 
have occasion to discuss them hereafter in rela- 
tion to some of the practical questions of the day. 
But manifestly this classification is not sufficiently 
fundamental for our present purpose. We need 
to inquire into the philosophical principle upon 
which civil society is founded. Upon what basis 
of authority does it rest ? Is the authority of the 
State inherent, or derived ? If derived, from 
whence ? and how ? Is the State a moral being, — 
a personality ? or is it simply a social compact, an 
arrangement or organization of men, maintained in 
order to attain the ends which they seek to secure 
through such government or society ? 

1 Bishop Warburton : The Alliance between Church and State, chap, 
iv. p. 41. 



I.] To Civil Society. 15 

Upon the two answers to these questions, two 
antagonistic theories of government have been 
founded. The first of these would make the State 
the unit, so to speak ; investing it with original 
sovereignty over the individual, and clothing it 
with the authority and attributes of a moral per- 
sonality. 1 The other makes the individual man 
the unit ; investing him with original sovereignty, 
declaring that he only has the authority and attri- 
butes of a moral personality, and resolving all 
civil government into a mere compact between 
men, entered into and maintained for certain 
common purposes, and in obedience to the im- 
pulses of their common nature. 2 Now, here it is 
to be remarked in passing, that the question is 
not at present whether government is or is not 
supported by a divine sanction. It is one of the 
common errors of this controversy, that the ques- 
tion of the divine sanction of human government 

1 Gladstone : The State in its Relations with the Church, pp. yj, ■$. 
Aristotle : Politics, bk. i. chap. ii. Count De Maistre : Du Pape, pp. 208, 
209,212,214. Machiavelli : II Principe, chap. x. Sir Robert Filmer : 
Patriarcha, chap. iii. pp. 78, 141. 

2 Grotius : De Jure Belli et Paris, I. 6, et seq. Hobbes : Leviathan, 
chap. xvii. p. 153, chap. xxi. p. 198. Locke: Of Civil Government, 
p. 383. Rousseau : Du Contrat social, i. 6. Burke : Reflections on the 
Revolution in France, ii. p. 368. 



1 6 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 



should be supposed to depend upon the definition 
of the philosophical basis of civil society. The 
argument in favor of such sanction is certainly 
not less strong under the social-compact hypoth- 
esis than under the theocratic hypothesis. The 
only question at present is, Which is the unit, 
— the State, or the individual man ? Does the 
authority of the State rest upon enactment, or 
compact ? Is civil society organized from the 
State downward, or from the individual up- 
ward ? 

The first of the views indicated above has been 
longest and most widely held in human history. 
In the ancient world it bore almost undisputed 
sway. It is not too much to say, that all absolute 
governments, all civic theocracies, all despotisms, 
both actual and theoretical, have rested upon its 
authority. The theory that man exists for the 
State, and not the State for man, was not more 
potent and unquestioned in the " practical poli- 
tics " of Sparta than it was in the speculations of 
Plato in the " Republic "and " Laws." l It ruled 
in the Porch and the Areopagus at Athens. It 
justified the imperial conquests of Alexander. It 

1 Plato : Republic, bk. vi. ; Laws, bk. v. 



I.] To Civil Society. 17 

was acknowledged at Rome, not less under the 
Republic than under the Empire. 1 From that 
day to this it has continued to be the basis of all 
the pretensions of irresponsible authority, and the 
divine right of kings ; and it is still held by multi- 
tudes of our contemporaries, and even of our own 
countrymen. 2 Nevertheless, the other theory, 
namely, that civil society rests upon a social com- 
pact between individuals ; a theory that regards 
the man as first, and makes the government his 
agent, and not his irresponsible master ; that be- 
gins with the rights of men, and exalts and digni- 
fies the individual, — this theory, though late in 
emerging into history, has exercised a wide and 
increasing influence in human affairs. No doubt 
the perversion of it has more than once intro- 
duced confusion into political speculation.3 No 
doubt it has been pleaded again and yet again in 
justification of the wildest and most revolutionary 
projects. Yet properly understood, and guarded 
by limitations, which I will endeavor in these in- 
quiries to point out, there is no doubt, I think, 

1 Lactantius : Institutiones Divinae, vi. 8. 

2 The prevalence and tendency of this theory in American politics will 
be pointed out in the Third Lecture. 

3 Rousseau: Du Contrat social, i. 6. 



1 8 The Relatioii of Christianity [Lect. 

that the doctrine of compact is the true philo- 
sophical basis of civil society. 

It is important to remember, that the inquiry in. 
which we are now engaged is not historical, but 
metaphysical. We are not now concerned to 
ascertain by what particular steps in actual his- 
tory any particular form of government came to 
be adopted; but our inquiry is, Upon what phil- 
osophical basis of authority does government in 
general, or civil society, rest ? The phenomenon 
to be accounted for is civil society ; and we desire 
to account for it, not empirically, but logically. 
The question really is, How would men now, or 
at any time, proceed, if all government were re- 
moved ? upon what principle would they necessa- 
rily and logically proceed ? It may be perfectly 
true that actual governments have been histori- 
cally developed from patriarchical or despotic 
authority ; yet, even in the case of such govern- 
ments, the only rationale of their logical authority 
is the concept of a compact among men as indi- 
viduals. Considered logically and not empirically, 
the elaboration of civil society could have taken 
place only as the act of mutually related individ- 
uals acting as moral persons ; and the only 



I.] To Civil Society. 19 

moral person belonging to the human category is 
the individual man. 1 Considered logically and not 
empirically, then, the impulse towards civil soci- 
ety must begin with the individual man, and must 
derive its authority immediately from him. No 
other philosophical genesis of it is conceivable on 
the postulate that the individual man is the only 
moral person belonging to the human category. 
The affirmation of this postulate on the one hand, 
and the denial of it on the other, has led to what 
may be justly termed the most notable contro- 
versy in the whole history of human speculation. 
This was the issue that was involved in the con- 
test between institutionalism and particularism in 
the old philosophies, and which raged in the fa- 
mous conflict between Nominalism and Realism 
in the Middle Ages. Long before Christianity, 
the Platonic theory of ideas, and the idealism of 
Aristotle, laid the foundation for such an institu- 
tionalistic philosophy as almost excluded the no- 
tion of the responsibility of the individual. We 
shall see in the next lecture how the corrective 

1 Compare Locke : Of Civil Government, chap. viii. Compare also 
Sir Henry Sumner Maine : Early History of Institutions, lect. xii. pp. 354- 
370. 



20 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

to this, which the Gospel supplied, was neutralized 
in large degree by the subordination of the 
Church to the civil power ; and when, in the Mid- 
dle Ages, the study of Aristotle was re-introduced 
into Europe by and through the Mahomedan 
doctors of Cordova, the School-authors eagerly 
adopted a modified type of the old idealism, and 
built up their famous doctrine of Realism, con- 
tending that universals were the only realities, 
and individuals nothing except as derived from 
them. Against this the inevitable re-action ap- 
peared in the theory of Nominalism, according 
to which individuals are the only realities, and 
universals but the figments of the mind, having 
no objective entity. The latest and most bril- 
liant champion of Nominalism was William of 
Occam, an Englishman, who won the battle for 
his theory at the English universities, and be- 
came the father of English liberty, and the 
philosophical forerunner of the Reformation. It 
is easy to see how nearly related this scholastic 
controversy was to the political questions which 
have since agitated the world. Looking back 
upon those wordy debates, we can discern a 
significance in them, which, perhaps, the pedan- 



L] To Civil Society. 21 

tic disputants themselves little understood. 
Though the postulate of Nominalism has been 
drafted into the service of many destructive 
tendencies, and needs, as we shall presently see, 
to be limited and controlled, yet in asserting the 
dignity of the individual man, and declaring that 
he alone is a moral and personal entity in the 
human category, the first step was taken towards 
the formulation of a true philosophy of civil soci- 
ety. Just as rapidly as this truth obtained the 
mastery, the dignity of conscience and the rights 
of men as men began to receive their due ac- 
knowledgment and recognition. The first blow 
was struck, since the conversion of Constantino, 
against despotism of all kinds when it was ad- 
mitted that man is greater than any agent that he 
employs, and that governments were made for 
men and by men, and not men by governments 
and for them. 

The philosophical postulate of Nominalism, 
however, needs to be qualified. Stated without 
qualification, it leads, no doubt, to all the errors of 
mere individualism ; but, properly stated, those 
errors are guarded against, and, indeed, excluded. 
" Nominalism acknowledges only the individual as 



22 The Relation of Christianity [Lect, 

the truly existing, and claims that the universal is 
but an abstraction from the individual." J This 
conclusion I accept. But, then, the individual 
cannot be regarded as an isolated being, but must 
be considered as a member of a class or genus 
composed of like individuals. In other words, all 
individuals are distinguished by characteristics 
which indicate that they should be classified into 
genera, and, in the case of man, by corresponding 
social instincts, which move them to so group 
themselves together ; and it is only in this asso- 
ciation that the individual is able to realize his 
own completeness. 2 For instance, the individual 
man only is the truly existing ; but it is the indi- 
vidual man characterized by a generic likeness to 
his fellow-man, and by a strong social instinct, 
which moves him to associate with his fellow-man, 
and to find his true completeness as well as his 
highest development and advantage in such asso- 
ciation. With this qualification we may freely 
apply the postulate of Nominalism to our present 
purpose, and are in a position to define the philo- 

1 Martensen : Christian Ethics, p. 211. • 

2 Martensen: Christian Ethics, p. 211. Aristotle: Politics, bk. i. 
chap. ii. 



I.] To Civil Society. 23 

sophical basis of civil society. Civil society, then, 
rests upon a social compact between individual 
men acting in obedience to a law of their being, 
and under the impulses of their common nature. 
The ethical subject in this compact is the indi- 
vidual man : but it is man the moral and spiritual 
being ; man made in the image of his Maker, and, 
however fallen, still the object of divine care ; it is 
man distinguished by such characteristics, guided 
by such direction, and acting under that impulse 
of his nature which moves him to seek his highest 
good in association with his fellows, — he it is 
who makes and maintains that social compact 
with his fellows which sustains and constitutes 
civil society. No doubt, some of the motives to 
such association are derivable from mere experi- 
ence ; but the original impulse is found in his 
own nature. For man is essentially a social and 
political, 1 as well as a moral and intellectual, being. 
There is a law of his nature which impels him 
toward political society. He has certain well- 
defined faculties and capacities which not only 
seek, but depend, for their highest development, 
upon association with his fellows : and while the 

1 Aristotle ; Politics, bk. i. chap. ii. 



24 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

social impulse is confirmed and justified by certain 
obvious advantages which belong exclusively to 
such association, yet, in the movement toward 
society, his whole nature is operative ; and he 
attains the highest development of his whole 
nature, only in the manifold relations of such 
society. There is a sense, indeed, in which the 
individual concedes something of personal liberty 
and advantage in exchange for the advantages 
which accrue to him from his social compact with 
his fellows. But there is a higher sense, in which 
every such concession not only secures a gain, 
but is in itself a gain, to the individual. 1 The obli- 
gation to society, then, is in the direction of the 
highest development of the individual ; and the 
tendencies of individual progress are not towards 
the disintegration of civil society, but towards the 
better establishing and perfecting of it. Only 
let it be freely acknowledged, that the basis of 
civil society is a social compact between men 
acting as free, but social and moral, beings, and 
we reach the great conclusions, that all govern- 
ments derive their just powers from the consent 
of the governed, and that civil society becomes 

1 Rousseau : Du Contrat social, pp. 6-8. 



i.] To Civil Society. 25 

more and more authoritative in the true sense of 
that word, and more and more secure, as men 
advance in the development and appropriation of 
civil liberty. 

We have seen that the controversy between the 
Realists and Nominalists led to the determination 
of the question which we have been considering. 
We need not be surprised at finding, however, 
that the relation of that contest to civil society 
was not apparent to the civilians and doctors of 
the Middle Ages, and that the theory of society to 
which it conducted was not formally defined till a 
comparatively recent date. For it has always been 
characteristic of political economists, that they 
attempt to adjust their theories to existing facts 
and received opinions ; and, in doing this, their 
theories are frequently sacrificed. The existing 
facts of absolute government, both in Church and 
State, and the received opinions in regard to the 
irresponsible authority of such government, were 
too formidable to be attacked by the ecclesiastical 
philosophers of the Middle Ages, even in their 
speculations. And their speculations were largely 
influenced and modified, as well as arrested, by 
their philosophical traditions and their political 



26 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

and social environment. Hence it was reserved 
for a civilian and jurisconsult of the seventeenth 
century to be the first to apply the true principle 
of Nominalism in the domain of politics. To 
Hugo Grotius belongs the imperishable honor of 
having first defined the philosophic basis of civil 
society. In the prolegomena to his treatise, " De 
Jure Belli et Pacis," which he composed in 1625, 
he declared that the social impulse — " societatis 
appetitus" — is the foundation of life in communi- 
ties, and that civil society is that state into which 
this impulse, acting freely and unselfishly, brings 
men together. It is significant that Aristotle had 
long before defined man as a "political animal," * 
but he failed to work out the great thought which 
seems to have been present to his mind. He 
adopted the theory, that the family was the origin 
of the State, — a theory which led to conclusions 
which are quite inconsistent with the received 
data of political economy, and which has therefore 
been abandoned by all really thoughtful political 
philosophers. 2 We shall have occasion in the 

1 Aristotle : Politics, bk. i. chap. ii. 

2 Luthardt : Moral Truths of Christianity, p. 164. Locke : First 
Treatise of Government. Sir Henry Sumner Maine : Ancient Law, chap, 
v. pp. 162, 163. 



L] To Civil Society. 27 

next lecture to see how even this view was aban- 
doned in the interest of a theocratic absolutism, 
which even the patriarchal idea of government 
was not adequate to justify. We shall also see 
how the operation of the great principle indicated 
by Christ was suspended for long centuries of 
imperial domination and ecclesiastical tyranny, 
so that it was not till after the Reformation that 
a Dutch civilian in exile at Paris formulated the 
true doctrine of civil liberty. Like all great 
thoughts, the thought of Grotius exhibited a mar- 
vellous fecundity. The English philosopher 
Hobbes, also sometime an exile like Grotius, 
seized the formula of the Dutch jurisconsult, and, 
under the influence of his eccentric genius, worked 
it out into the grotesque philosophy which has 
since beei* identified with his name. 1 Almost 
immediately Spinoza brought to bear upon the 
same subject the finer resources of his subtle 
speculation. 2 In England, Locke, Warburton, and 
Hoadley ranged themselves on the same side ; 
while Sir Robert Filmer, and the political school 
which he founded, as earnestly contended against 

1 Hobbes : De Cive, and The Leviathan. 

2 Spinoza : Tractatus Theologico-politicus, chap. xvi. 



28 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

the new doctrine, sometimes on the ground that 
the State had a patriarchal origin, sometimes 
on the theocratic postulate of the divine right of 
kings. 1 The most complete elaboration of the 
social-compact theory, however, was made by 
Rousseau in " Du Contrat social," published in 
1 76 1, in which he wrote what may be justly 
termed the first great philosophical treatise on 
civil society. His misguided genius, however, 
continually led him astray ; and, through his eccen- 
tricities, the great principle of Grotius has been 
held responsible for conclusions not justly deriv- 
able from it. Perhaps it may be said, that the 
principle of Grotius, as perverted by Rousseau, led 
on to the French Revolution ; while the same 
principle, as elaborated by Locke, Hoadley, and 
Warburton, has led on to the establishment on 
these shores of civil and religious liberty. 

Let us now briefly indicate one or two conclu- 
sions from the foregoing considerations. The 
first of these is, that governments derive their 
just powers from the consent of the governed. 
So far as civil society is concerned, the will of 
the people is the supreme law. The doctrine of 

1 Sir Robert Filmer : Patriarcha. 



I.] To Civil Society. 29 

a " higher law," then, has no place in a true phi- 
losophy of civil society. This doctrine, which has 
always been at once the plea of fanaticism and the 
last refuge of tyranny, is excluded from the domain 
of politics by the theory which is here propounded. 
Nevertheless, the true authority of government is 
distinctly guarded by the principle, that men, in 
forming and maintaining the social compact of 
civil society, are acting in obedience to impulses 
that must control them, and are moving towards 
the perfection of their being. It follows, then, 
that the power of government may be progres- 
sive along the line of social development, but 
that this progression must rest on the consent of 
the governed, and must be further controlled, not 
only by the will of the body politic, but also by 
the inalienable right which every soul has to the 
highest and best development of his own nature. 
There are, therefore, certain essential limitations 
to the power of government, which are interposed 
by the inalienable rights of man ; x and there may 
be as many other limitations imposed as may be 
enacted by the popular will, provided such limita- 
tions do not work the destruction of civil society. 

1 John Stuart Mill : On Liberty. 



30 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

Between the two extremes here indicated, there 
are certain debatable questions, such as the func- 
tion of government in the matter of education 
and in the administration of charity. These are 
hereafter to be considered by us in connection 
with our principal topic, which is, The Relation of 
Christianity to Civil Society. 

Before passing from this branch of our subject, 
let me make an appeal, — first, for the thoughtful 
consideration, and then for the hearty acceptance, 
of this theory of civil society ; and this because 
I believe it to be the true theory, and because I 
believe it to be the theory on which all our own 
civil institutions are founded. Too often and too 
long have religious men maintained a certain re- 
serve in acknowledging the correctness of the 
principle upon which the whole structure of our 
government rests. Because of this reserve, there 
is a widening breach between the teachers of 
religion and the leaders of political affairs. Reli- 
gion is gravely suspected of being still identified 
with despotism, because religious teachers are sup- 
posed to be constantly appealing to a " higher law" 
in the domain of politics, and exhibiting a profound 
distrust in the principles of popular sovereignty. 



i.] To Civil Society. 31 

It is one of the objects of these lectures, to indi- 
cate that popular sovereignty, organizing itself in 
civil society, and in obedience to the best and 
highest impulses of man's social and moral nature, 
is the legitimate outcome of the influence of Chris- 
tianity, and that it is only under the social-com- 
pact theory, properly understood, that Christianity 
can freely act as the conservative of civil society. 
Having now defined the philosophic basis of 
civil society, it only remains, that we should like- 
wise define Christianity before we begin to con- 
sider the relation between them. The true theory 
of Christianity will be best considered in the next 
lecture, in the course of what I shall have to say 
of Jesus and his work. Let it suffice here to say, 
that the movement by which Christianity was 
formulated was, in a certain sense, the opposite 
of that which elaborated civil society. The latter 
began with the individual ; that is, from below : 
the former began from above. The latter rests 
upon the consent of men : the former rests upon 
the command of God. The latter depends upon 
a social compact between equals : the former de- 
pends on loyalty to a personal law-giver and king. 
The State, or civil society, is not theocratic 



32 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

in any sense. The Church is theocratic, and is 
the only theocracy. This contradistinction con- 
stitutes the essential separateness of Church and 
State, and renders any attempt to unite, or com- 
bine, or formally to ally them, an embarrassment 
and a profound wrong to both. Uncombined and 
unallied, left free to act and re-act on each other, 
the relation between them may be mutually help- 
ful. The moment constraint enters into this 
relation, it becomes hurtful. Here, then, are our 
two terms of relation, — a theocratic Church which 
is wholly non-political, and a social-compact State 
which is wholly secular. The bond that sustains 
the one is personal loyalty to a living, contemporary 
king and law-giver : the bond that sustains the 
other is the obligation that man, as a social and 
moral being, has to society. The authority upon 
which the one rests is the enactment and institu- 
tion of a divine founder. The authority upon which 
the other rests is the will of the people. The 
point of contact between the two is the individual 
man. If man is a political being by nature, all 
his social and civil instincts are expanded, trans- 
formed, rectified, enlarged, by the influence of 
Christianity. Under its operation the societatis 



L] To Civil Society. 33 

appetitus is transformed and expanded into broth- 
erly love. TKe social compact is re-enforced by 
the characteristic Christian principle of the broth- 
erhood of the human race. By Christianity a 
moral motive-power is supplied, which is far better 
than any mere pact or enactment in keeping 
society together; and that is, the charity that is 
not easily provoked, the love that works no ill 
to his neighbor. To the motives which tend to 
insure well-being in this world, it adds the loftier 
hopes, the nobler aspirations, the better purposes, 
that bind the Christian man to an endless future. 
It helps him to be a better citizen of this world, 
in teaching him that he has a citizenship in 
heaven. Christianity presides at the source and 
in the sanctuary of civil life. Through the indi- 
vidual conscience, the individual intelligence, the 
individual affections, — as these are the objects 
of divine grace, and then become the subjects of 
social and political power, — through these ave- 
nues, the living Christ is to-day operating upon 
civil society, and is showing himself more and 
more to be the Leader of civilization and the 
Ruler of the world. 



LECTURE II. 

THE ANSWER OF CHRIST, AND THE DEVEL- 
OPMENTS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 



LECTURE II. 

THE ANSWER OF CHRIST, AND THE DEVELOPMENTS 
OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. 

11 But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye 
hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a 
penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription ? 
They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore 
unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's ; and unto God the things that 
are God's." — St. Matthew xxii. 18-21. 

TT has already been pointed out, that the pur- 
■*■ pose of the Pharisees, in sending their disci- 
ples with the Herodians to Jesus, was, to betray 
him into one of two alternative dangers in defin- 
ing his attitude towards the Roman civil au- 
thority. The craftiness with which their ques- 
tion was put was worthy of the deep-laid plan out 
of which it proceeded. The inquirers came to 
Jesus as to a Master in Israel, one who taught 
the way of God in truth, as though they would 
refer to him the settlement of a pending dispute. 
There was a subtle attempt at flattery, moreover, 
in their allusion to his conspicuous and manly in- 

37 



38 The Relation of Christianity. [Lect. 

dependence, — his freedom from all kinds of social 
and political obsequiousness, — "Thou regardest 
not the person of men." They appealed to him, 
therefore, for an authoritative and out-spoken dec- 
laration, either for or against the lawfulness of a 
certain tribute, or tax, levied by Caesar ; believing 
that his answer, whether affirmative or negative, 
would serve their purpose of hostility to him. A 
brief consideration of the political and religious 
antagonisms of the time will show that their ex- 
pectation was well founded. To the orthodox and 
patriotic Jews, the levying of this capitation-tax 
was doubly odious, not only as a burdensome ex- 
action, but also as the badge of the subjection of 
the chosen people of God to a detested and des- 
potic Gentile power. The religious and patriotic 
zeal of all the more respectable and devout was 
aroused into fierce opposition to this sacrilegious 
spoliation of the heritage of Jehovah. The coarse 
and brutal Roman procurator, whose office had 
special regard to the supervision of the revenue, 
had made this tax still more hateful by his con- 
temptuous disdain of the scruples of the Jews. Of 
all the Jews, the Galileans were conspicuous for 
their patriotic opposition to the despotism under 



ii.] To Civil Society. 39 

which the nation groaned ; and it was not forgot- 
ten that Jesus belonged to Galilee. In the sa- 
cred precincts of the temple itself, within whose 
courts they were then standing, the Roman gov- 
ernor had not scrupled to slay Galilean worship- 
pers, even at the foot of the altar, and to mingle 
their blood with the daily sacrifice. If, then, 
Jesus should answer affirmatively that it was law- 
ful and right to pay this hated tribute, and so 
range himself on the side of the bloody tyrant, 
there would be an end of all his influence with his 
countrymen. Such an answer would, in their esti- 
mation, effectually dispose of all his pretensions 
to the Messiahship of the Jews. But if, on the 
other hand, he should declare, as a public and in- 
fluential teacher, that it was not lawful and right 
to pay the tax, there were the Herodians ready to 
take the news of his treasonable utterance to the 
truculent Roman governor, who would surely 
make short work with any popular leader of 
whom they could say, " We have found him per- 
verting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute 
to Caesar." l 

The exact position of the Herodians in regard 

1 St. Luke xxiii. 2. 



40 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

to this and kindred subjects is involved in much 
obscurity. In attempting to ascertain their polit- 
ical opinions, we have little more than their name 
to guide us. This would seem to indicate, that as 
the partisans of Herod, who was an Idumasan in 
race, a Jew by conversion, and a satrap of the 
Roman emperor by appointment, they were the 
native upholders of the imperial authority, as 
represented by the petty prince from whom their 
name was derived. At all events, it is perfectly 
certain that they were ready to report any trea- 
sonable utterance of the Galilean Prophet to the 
Roman authorities. To such men it was sure to 
be both a congenial and a gainful vocation, to spy 
out treason, and hunt down the disaffected ; and 
it was in order to this that they were now joined 
in ill-omened alliance with the Pharisees. The 
Herodians, then, are to be considered, whatever 
their own political and religious opinions, as the 
representatives on this occasion of that imperial 
policy to which it was supposed that the utter- 
ances of Jesus might be obnoxious, and to the 
resentment of which it was their purpose to 
betray him. Pontius Pilate, the vicegerent of 
such imperialism, was quartered at that moment 



I i.J To Civil Society. 41 

in his official apartments in the palace of Herod. 
Within a few feet of where they stood were the 
stairs which connected the cloisters of the temple 
with the Tower of Antonia, from which the Roman 
guards overlooked the sacred enclosure. Jesus 
and his questioners were standing, then, within 
the very shadow, so to speak, of that overbearing 
and remorseless imperialism, which demanded, 
not only tribute, but homage, and even worship. 
For it must not be forgotten that the Roman 
theory of government was not less theocratic and 
exacting in its way than was the theory of the 
Jews. Though Rome, as a matter of wise policy, 
did not ordinarily interfere with the religions of 
conquered peoples, yet she always assumed the 
right to regulate them ; and, even in enrolling 
them as religiones licetce, she assumed and exer- 
cised what we would call a spiritual jurisdiction 
over the religions of the world. Nor was this all. 
The authority of the Roman State had always 
been supposed to rest on no popular right, but on 
a right assumed to be divine. 1 With Julius and 
Augustus Caesar this theory was embodied in the 
cultus of the imperium divum. The poet Virgil 

1 James Bryce, D.C.L. : The Holy Roman Empire, p. 20. 



42 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

taught the Roman world to salute the young 
Augustus as the divine boy who descended from 
the skies to institute on earth the reign of Jove. 1 
From that time the person of the Caesar was 
sacred. To him or to his Genius temples were 
erected, and divine honors paid, even while he 
was alive. 2 It soon came to be proclaimed, wher- 
ever the Roman eagles were displayed, that Caesar 
was a god. In that weary and despairing age, 
amid the multitude of subjugated deities, the idea 
was not slow of acceptance, that there was one 
god, at least, whose power was no delusion, who 
could punish and reward, who could build up and 
destroy, — and that god was Caesar. To acknowl- 
edge his divineness came to be the characteristic 
religion of the empire, and the worship of him 
was soon identified with loyalty. Victorious gen- 
erals and imperial deputies, like the younger 
Pliny in a later age, made the yielding of divine 
honors to the emperor, the doing sacrifice to the 
statue of the Caesar, a test, both of loyalty and of 
fitness to live.3 There is strong ground for believ- 

1 Virgil : Georgics, i. 24 ; iv. 0o. 

2 Bryce: The Holy Roman Empire, p. 23. Horace: Odes, iii. 3, 11. 
Ovid : Epistolarum ex Ponto, iv. 9, 105. Tacitus : Annales, i. 73 ; iii. 38. 

3 Robertson : History of the Christian Church, vol. i. p. 18. 



ii.] To Civil Society. 43 

ing that Pilate himself was prepared to impose 
this cult upon the subject-people over whom he 
was placed. When he removed his headquarters 
from Caesarea to Jerusalem, he introduced the im- 
perial standards bearing the image of the Caesar 
into the Holy City ; though he was compelled to do 
so by night, and in contemptuous defiance of the 
repeated and impassioned entreaties of the Jews. 
On another occasion he persisted in a similar 
policy in spite of tumult and insurrection, till an 
order from the emperor himself restrained the 
zeal of this too religious governor. 1 Upon the 
theory of Pilate, therefore, and of the Herodians, 
who on this occasion, at least, were the representa- 
tives of his opinions, the paying of tribute was 
due to Caesar as an act of loyalty and homage, 
and as the acknowledgment of his divine author- 
ity. Because the Caesar was divine, he was en- 
titled to the allegiance and the tribute of all the 
peoples of the earth ; and loyalty to Roman power 
meant the acknowledgment, not merely of the 
wisdom of Roman laws and the might of Roman 
arms, but the divineness of the imperial god. 2 

1 Philo Judaeus : Ad Caium, 30, 31, 45, 46. 

2 Bryce: Holy Roman Empire, pp. 5, 6. 



44 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

With ready insight Jesus perceived the crafti- 
ness of his questioners, and the danger into which 
they would betray him. But, from his stand-point, 
the answer was obvious which would astonish and 
confound them. He called for the Roman coin in 
which the imperial tax was required to be paid. 
" Shew me the tribute money." They placed a 
Roman denarius in his hands. From coins of the 
same mintage still extant, we are able to under- 
stand the exact force of what he said. " On one 
side were stamped the haughty, beautiful features 
of the Emperor Tiberius, with all the wicked 
scorn upon the lip ; on the obverse his title of 
Pontifcx Maximus." * To the Pharisee, as I have 
said, the payment of this tribute was altogether 
odious, as the evidence of a political servitude 
which his soul abhorred ; and the coin itself was 
to him an abominable thing, with an idolatrous 
image thereon, that suggested the pontifical 
supremacy of a Gentile despot, instead of the sole 
headship of Jehovah. To the Pharisee, therefore, 
this tribute was sacrilege. To the Roman, on the 
other hand, it was simple loyalty to one whose 

1 Canon Farrar : The Life of Christ, vol. ii. p. 231. Compare Bryce's 
Holy Roman Empire, p. 23. 



II.] To Civil Society. 45 

power was irresistible because his authority was 
divine. The answer of Jesus, to the utter amaze- 
ment of his questioners, took sides with neither of 
these alternative theories. He occupied a stand- 
point altogether different from theirs, — a stand- 
point not before occupied by any teacher. His 
answer, therefore, perplexed and confounded them ; 
so that "they marvelled and left him, and went 
their way." To him the paying of this tribute 
was not at all what it seemed to either party of his 
questioners to be. In his estimation the denarius 
was simply the current coin of the realm, the 
symbol, both of commercial value, and of an ac- 
knowledged political and commercial obligation to 
contribute to the maintenance of the existing civil 
society, — nothing more. The fact that the coin 
was current, and had been struck at Caesar's mint, 
was conclusive evidence that the imperial govern- 
ment was the acknowledged civil power. Give 
back, then, to Caesar, he said, the tribute which 
the very currency of this coin proves that you 
have acknowledged yourselves bound to give, but 
render to God the things that are God's, And, 
saying this, he said implicitly to both Pharisee and 
Herodian, The payment of this tribute has not the 



46 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

significance that you attach to it, nor is civil 
society what you suppose it to be. Civil govern- 
ment is not theocratic in either the Jewish or the 
Roman sense, and the payment of a tax to it does 
not ascribe to it such a character. Religious 
scruples, then, and religious partisanship, have 
nothing to do with this matter. The payment of 
tribute to Caesar is simply a political obligation, 
acknowledged to be binding by the very currency 
of this coin which you have received from his 
mint ; but it is in no sense an act of religious 
homage. To give tribute to Caesar is a duty, yes ; 
but it is a political duty. Man's religious duty, 
the homage of his soul, is due only to his God. 

It is evident, then, that Jesus occupied a new 
stand-point in politics, and defined a new relation 
between religion and civil society. It is impor- 
tant, therefore, that we should attentively consider 
what his point of view was, and by what steps he 
reached it, — all the more important, because, for 
reasons which are hereafter to be given, the posi- 
tion which he assumed was abandoned by his 
Church, and has yet to be regained in by far the 
greater part of Christendom. It must be obvious 
that nothing more than a mere outline-sketch can 



ii.] To Civil Society. 47 

be here attempted of what has been termed the 
''plan " of Jesus ; yet his plan is distinguished by- 
such simplicity and consistency, and is so easily 
discernible in the authentic records of his earthly 
life and teaching, that a mere outline will suffice 
to define it. His plan, then, was to set up the 
kingdom of God in the world, of which kingdom 
he, as God, was to be the head and king ; to 
establish the true theocracy, of which the elder 
theocracy of the Jews was but the type and prepa- 
ration. He designed, moreover, that such theoc- 
racy should be wholly distinct from the kingdoms 
of this world. In a word, he decreed the total 
separation of Church and State ; designing, that 
neither in alliance nor in antagonism, but through 
the conscience and the moral nature of the indi- 
vidual man, there should be established the only 
relation between Christianity and civil society. 

Nothing is more certain than that Jesus as- 
sumed to be the Messiah of the Jews, the Prince 
of the house of David, whose mission was, to 
build up the long-expected kingdom of God. The 
prophetic announcement which proclaimed his 
coming was repeated in the first utterance of his 
own ministry, " The kingdom of God is at hand." 



48 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

To the Jews this announcement seemed to have 
a definite meaning. It seemed to them to pro- 
claim the immediate restoration of the old theoc- 
racy, the re-assertion of the autonomy of the 
chosen people, the throwing-off the yoke of a for- 
eign oppressor, the restoration of royalty to the 
house of David. But Jesus intended both less 
and more : he intended, indeed, to set up the 
kingdom of God, and to assume, in virtue of his 
own divine royalty, the headship thereof; he in- 
tended to establish the true theocracy, which 
prophets had foretold ; but, in order to this, he 
intended to separate his kingdom from every 
thing that was local, partial, preparatory ; he in- 
tended to make it a universal and everlasting 
kingdom, belonging to both worlds, the seen and 
the unseen, to time and eternity ; and therefore 
he intended to dissociate it from the kingdoms of 
this world. 

It is not difficult to see in what respects the 
ideal of Jesus surpassed the elder theocracy, even 
in its best days. In accordance with the divine 
method, as revealed to us in all history, the elder 
dispensation was limited by the conditions of 
development and progress to which it was ad- 



II.] To Civil Society. 49 

justed. The time had not yet come when the 
tribal instinct could be set aside. The most that 
could be done was, to expand it into the larger 
instinct of national life. Nor had the time yet 
come when the civil as distinguished from the 
ecclesiastical instinct could be altogether trusted 
to organize the people. Therefore the religious 
and ecclesiastical organization of Israel was made 
to take the place of civil society. With all its 
changes and modifications, however, it is evident 
that the elder dispensation was partly typical, 
partly special, and partly preparatory, and that it 
was not intended to be perpetuated in all its de- 
tails in the new dispensation, which was to fulfil 
it. With divine insight, therefore, Jesus resolved 
to revive the theocracy in its ideal, that is to say, 
in its permanent and universal, form ; and this 
involved the disconnecting of it, both in idea and 
form, from what was local, temporal, transitory. 

The purpose, then, of Jesus, to establish a uni- 
versal and everlasting kingdom, of which he him- 
self, in virtue of his divine royalty, should be king, 
involved on his part the utter renunciation of all 
temporal and civil authority. It was not merely 
because he determined to found his kingdom on 



50 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

the law of self-sacrifice, and not on force, — to 
make love, and not coercion, its principle of cohe- 
sion, — that he renounced the temporal sover- 
eignty of the kingdoms of this world ; but it was 
also because the two kinds of sovereignty, the 
temporal and the spiritual, were incompatible, and 
could not be united without injury to both. The 
issue was distinctly presented to him in his temp- 
tation, and was then definitely settled. From the 
great decision which he then made, he never 
wavered. He saw, that for him, with his divine 
ideals and everlasting purpose, to undertake the 
headship of this world's kingdoms would be to 
renounce his divine mission. From the first, 
therefore, he never dallied with the thought of 
earthly sovereignty. Once, when called upon to 
exercise the judicial function, which the Jews 
naturally expected him, both as Messiah^ and 
Prophet, to undertake, he distinctly declined such 
a function, saying, " Man, who made me a judge 
or a divider over you ? " So, on more than one 
occasion, he refused to exercise any of the official 
functions of civic life quite as persistently as he 
refused to appeal to force, or to lean on the sword 
of the military power. So also, and notably in 



ii.] To Civil Society. 51 

our text, he referred the determination of the 
civic duty of his questioners to the terms of the 
social compact under which they lived, pointing 
to the mintage of the coin which they themselves 
had already accepted as current, to indicate the 
obligations of their political citizenship, and con- 
fining his own dogmatic utterance of what their 
duty was to the obligation which they owed, not 
to Caesar, but to God. So, finally, when ar- 
raigned before Pilate on the charge of claiming to 
be a king, he solemnly reiterated the claim, but 
denied the accusation of his accusers by declaring 
that his "kingdom is not of this world." To the 
Roman such a claim was unintelligible. To his 
Jewish accusers, while it denied the charge which 
they formally made, it confessed the real griev- 
ance which they had against him. It was not *fca£t 
he claimed to be a king ; it was not even that he 
claimed to be a king by divine right, and as the 
Son of God, that constituted the real fault which 
they found in him, — but it was because, while he 
claimed to be a king, he refused to exercise a 
temporal sovereignty. It was precisely because 
his kingdom was not of this world, and because 
he would not summon his servants to fight, and so 



52 The Relation of Christiaiiity [Lect. 

to smite their heathen oppressors hip and thigh, 
that the Jews rejected his Messiahship, and 
delivered him up to die. 

Reflection upon the nature of the kingdom 
which Jesus did set up, and upon the philosophi- 
cal basis of civil society, confirms the view here 
taken of the essential incompatibility of ecclesias- 
tical and civil power. From the point of view 
which we have already reached, it seems too evi- 
dent to require further argument, that the Founder 
of Christianity designed that his Church should 
be forever separate from the civil State. The 
Church was instituted as a universal and enduring 
theocracy, of which Jesus himself was the head 
and king. Membership in his Church, he decreed, 
should depend on faith and grace, — faith in the 
recipient, and grace from himself, the giver, — and 
should consist in personal loyalty to himself as a 
living king, which loyalty was to be sustained, 
not only in the obedience of discipleship, but in 
personal communion with him in sacrament and 
prayer. This kingdom was to be fixed, unvarying, 
universal; having an " order" that could not be 
altered, and a "faith" that could not be changed : 
because such order was instituted by the Law- 



ii.] To Civil Society. 53 

giver himself, who also delivered "the faith once 
for all" to his disciples. Civil society, on the other 
hand, was not instituted by the supreme Law-giver, 
nor was any institute of civil polity enacted by 
him. It is not pretended by any that the Founder 
of Christianity undertook in any sense to constitute 
a State, though undoubtedly he did constitute a 
Church. While, therefore, the basis of Christian- 
ity is altogether theocratic, the only philosophical 
basis of civil society is found, in the absence of 
any enactment and institution thereof, to be a 
social compact between individual men, acting in 
accordance with the moral and social impulses of 
their nature. The very fact, then, that Jesus did 
constitute his Church, making it theocratic, but 
did not constitute the State, leaving it to be orga- 
nized or elaborated by the impulses towards soci- 
ety, which already existed in human nature, is in 
itself conclusive proof, that, in his design, the 
Church was to be distinct and separate from the 
civil power. 

But the argument can be pushed a step farther. 
It is to be observed, that, while Jesus designed 
that his kingdom should not interfere with the 
functions of civil society, he not only refrained 



54 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

from recognizing the State as a corresponding 
theocracy, but he designed that the old claim of 
divine right or theocratic authority on the part 
of the State should be eventually overthrown, 
and that civil society should rest on a secular and 
social compact between men as men. It is not 
more certain that he intended that the Church 
should be a theocracy than that he intended that 
the State should rest its claim to authority simply 
on the consent of the governed : but, in the case 
of the Church, he enacted his purpose in its very 
constitution ; while, in the case of the State, he 
simply set a principle in operation that would 
eventually work out his design. While Jesus, in 
establishing his kingdom in virtue of his own di- 
vine royalty, demanded the allegiance and loyalty 
of his disciples, yet, in the very act of doing this 
of divine right, he inaugurated a principle that 
would eventually make a similar claim on the part 
of any earthly kingdom impossible. For in mak- 
ing personal repentance, personal faith, and the 
gift of personal grace, the condition of member- 
ship in his kingdom, he emancipated the individ- 
ual man, and declared the individual, and not the 
tribe, the nation, or the race, to be the ethical 



ii.] To Civil Society. 55 

subject. Before that time, at least among the 
Gentile nations, the individual man had been as 
nothing. Under the old theory of government, he 
had simply been an undivided and unconsidered 
part of the State. His dignity, if any he had, was 
measured by the accident of birth, or of wealth, or 
of achievement. All except the few so distin- 
guished were the "profanum vulgns" without in- 
dividuality and without rights. Nothing in all 
history is so pathetic as the unlegendary insig- 
nificance of the masses of mankind at the begin- 
ning of the Christian era. When to the burden 
of external oppression we add the consideration of 
the dumb, hopeless misery which belonged to the 
complete obliteration of all individuality, the utter 
extermination of all personal dignity and self-re- 
spect wrought by the civil and military tyrannies 
of that time, we gain an idea, not otherwise at- 
tainable, of the utter wretchedness of that ancient 
world. In such a state of things, the acceptance 
of Christianity was a wakening from the dead, — 
a personal emancipation. By it, for the first time 
in long, dreary ages, the masses of mankind were 
individualized. The first startling note of the 
gospel, in convicting the hearer of sin, awakened 



56 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

in him, for the first time perhaps, the sense of in- 
dividual responsibility : and with the sense of 
pardon came the sublime sense of sonship to 
quicken and crown his wondering soul ; for it 
was the distinguishing peculiarity of Christianity, 
that it dealt, not with men in the mass, but with 
men as individuals. It taught the great truth, 
that the individual alone is the ethical subject. It 
denounced its penalties, and promised its gracious 
rewards to the individual soul ; and, in thus resolv- 
ing humanity into individuals, it set in motion a 
principle which was sure eventually to work man's 
political emancipation. It is impossible to exag- 
gerate — it is often difficult for us to understand 
— the elevating force of the gospel when it was 
first preached in the Roman empire. The poor, 
the outcast, the oppressed, became conscious of a 
dignity and a self-determining power that made 
their life, even in this world, altogether different 
from what it before had been. He who had won' 
citizenship in the kingdom of God could not be 
in real subjection to any man. Constantly, there- 
fore, and silently, the gospel in the apostolic age 
was working emancipation, and was undermining 
the old basis of authority on which the despotism 



it.] To Civil Society. 57 

of the Roman Government rested. And herein 
arose a danger to Christianity itself, that the 
apostles were not slow to discover, and to warn 
the faithful against. The emancipation of the 
Christian was not intended to be a violent one. 
In no case was it intended to work or encourage 
social or political insubordination. It was not 
designed to discredit government or social order. 
Nay, it was not designed to deny, but rather to 
insist upon, the divine sanction of all such govern- 
ments as should be actually established until bet- 
ter should be compassed in the natural and regular 
way. Even heathen governments were of divine 
sanction, not in the sense of having been insti- 
tuted by God, but in the sense of resting for their 
true authority upon a compact or consent which 
was the outcome of social impulses implanted by 
God in human nature, and of serving purposes 
approved by God; and the apostolic injunction 
was, therefore, both timely and right, that " every 
soul should be subject unto the higher powers. 
For there is no power but of God : the powers 
that be are ordained of God." 1 " Wherefore ye 
must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also 

1 Romans xiii. i. 



58 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

for conscience sake." " The emancipation offered 
by the gospel, then, was perfectly compatible with 
obedience to constituted authority. It was fat 
more complete and profound than any that mere 
insubordination or revolution could effect. It 
completely changed the recognized basis of au- 
thority in civil society. It revealed to man, that 
civil government rested on no higher authority 
than the individual consent and the individual 
conscience, and that these are a sufficient basis 
for it to rest on ; and that, in being subject for 
conscience' sake, man could still be free under 
any civil goverment, ay, even in bonds, if, as a 
matter of conscience and of his own free will, he 
should consent to be in subjection. 

Here, then, was the relation established by 
Christ between Christianity and civil society. 
The Church was a pure theocracy, with a fixed 
faith and order, and ruled over by a living king. 
Under this theocracy, men were emancipated into 
the freedom, the dignity, the responsibility, of 
individuality. From this new stand-point, civil 
society was seen to be wholly distinct from the 
Church, and to have no other basis than the con- 

1 Romans xiii. 5. 



ii.] To Civil Society. 59 

sent of the people. Nevertheless, to yield that 
consent was an obligation of conscience, since 
civil society is in accordance with man's nature 
and God's will ; and therefore " the powers that 
be are ordained of God." Under the relation so 
established, the Church was left free, notwith- 
standing her fixed' order, to adjust her organiza- 
tion, so to speak, to external conditions. 1 So 
could she enter into such relations with any State 
as would range her on the side of the peace and 
well-being of society. The very distinction so 
plainly worked out in Church history between 
the Church's fixed order and variable organization 
clearly indicates, that, while the one was divinely 
appointed, the other was of human origin and 
authority ; and the actual attitude assumed and 
maintained by the Church in the apostolic and sub- 
apostolic age is perfectly consistent therewith. 
For more than two centuries the Church under- 
took to exercise no temporal authority, and sought 
no recognition from, or alliance with, the civil 
power. And this was not at all because the State 

1 I trust I may refer without impropriety to a sermon on the Polity of 
the Church, preached by me before the Clerical Association of Cleveland 
in 1880, and published, in which the distinction between " order " and 
"organization " is pointed out. 



60 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

was heathen ; for the apostolic teaching was, that 
even a heathen government had the divine sanc- 
tion, as we have seen : but it was because the 
attitude and relation instituted by Christ were 
not forgotten or departed from in the Church's 
early and most triumphant days. Nevertheless, 
the time did come when this relation and this 
attitude were abandoned. In an evil hour the 
Church yielded to the patronage of an unbaptized 
emperor, 1 and submitted to an alliance with the 
powers of this world. Then it was that the 
Church of Christ consented to become, in some 
respects at least, a department of the civil power. 
From that moment her true glory began to be 
obscured, her triumphs to be limited, and the 
unnumbered evils of Byzantinism and the Papacy, 
and of the contest between them, to afflict the 
Christian world, and to retard the civilization and 
evangelization of the human race. 

In order to understand the full import of this 
disastrous alliance, which an eminent Christian 
historian has fitly termed "one of the greatest 
tours d'addresse that Satan ever played," 2 it will 

1 It is noteworthy that Constantine was not baptized till just before 
his death. 2 Arnold : Miscellaneous Works, p. 436. 



II.] To Civil Society. 61 

be necessary to consider for a moment what 
authority Constantine claimed as emperor, how 
far his pretensions were renounced or modified in 
nominally embracing Christianity, and to what 
extent he imposed his pretensions on the Church. 
Let it be remembered, then, that, as emperor, 
Constantine, and all his imperial predecessors, 
had based their authority on a divine right to rule. 
From the time of Augustus Caesar the emperors 
were acknowledged as vicegerents of God. " Their 
persons were hallowed by the office of Pontifex 
Maximus and the tribunitian power." ' Poets, 
as has been already pointed out, had sung the 
advent of the young Augustus as the descent of 
a divine boy from the skies, who should deliver 
and bless mankind. " The effigy of the emperors 
was sacred, even on a coin." 2 "Divine honors 
were paid to them in life as well as after death." 3 
" In the confused multiplicity of mythologies, the 
worship of the emperor was the only worship 
common to the whole Roman world." 4 Now, 
when Constantine accepted Christianity, some of 
these pretensions were modified certainly ; but 
none of them were wholly renounced. "Under 

1 Bryce : Holy Roman Empire, p. 23. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. * Ibid. 



62 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

the new religion the form of adoration vanished : 
the sentiment of reverence remained." l The title 
and office of Pontifex Maximus were retained, and 
adapted to the new condition of affairs. The right 
to control the Church as well as the State was 
promptly asserted, and was formally admitted at 
Nicaea and elsewhere by a too subservient hierar- 
chy. 2 Eusebius speaks of Constantine as a kind 
of general bishop,3 and relates, that, on one occa- 
sion, the emperor told some episcopal guests, that, 
as they were bishops within the Church, so God 
had made him bishop without it. 4 And in num- 
berless ways he proceeded to lord it over Christ's 
heritage, placing himself at the head of the 
Church, and subordinating the spiritual to the 
civil power. 

Apart from the secularization of the Church 
and the depravation of Christianity which resulted 
from this unholy alliance, important consequences 
of another kind, and equally disastrous, began to 
flow from it. The clergy, leaning on the secular 
arm, and defending the emperor's assumptions of 

1 Bryce: Holy Roman Empire, p. 23. 2 Ibid. 

3 Robertson : History of the Christian Church, vol. i. p. 419. 

4 Ibid. 421. 



II.] To Civil Society. 6$ 

power, soon began to formulate the idea of a uni- 
versal or world-church, to correspond exactly with 
the empire or world-state. As the empire, or- 
dained of God, was one ; so should the Church's 
unity be a like imperial unity. St. Augustine, in 
his great work, "The City of God," worked out a 
portion of this ideal relation. The further thought 
soon followed of a world-bishop or Pope, to corre- 
spond with the world-king or emperor ; and this 
was the genesis of the Papacy. 1 Circumstances 
favored the complete development of the idea. 
The removal of the seat of empire from old Rome 
to "New Rome," or Constantinople, universalized 
the civil idea, but correspondingly weakened it. 
The irruption of the barbarians, who found noth- 
ing to respect, and spared nothing, in the West 
but the power of the Roman see ; the division of 
the empire, and the growing influence of the 
bishops of Rome in that time of tumult, — con- 
tinued to exalt the ecclesiastical power of the 
Popes, till at length, in the pretensions of 
Hadrian I., 2 the spiritual supremacy of the suc- 
cessor of Peter was proclaimed : and when Leo 

1 Bryce: Holy Roman Empire, p. 91 et seq. 

2 Abbe Guettee : The Papacy, p. 258. 



64 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

III. placed the iron crown on the brow of Charle- 
magne, the temporal supremacy of the Papal see 
seemed also to be acknowledged, at least in the 
West. The time speedily came when the Papal 
pretensions became quite unendurable by the 
emperor. It is still a question as to how far 
Charlemagne intended, by receiving his crown at 
the Pope's hands, to acknowledge the Pope's supe- 
rior authority. Certain it is, that the story, so 
long believed, that Constantine had, by special 
grant, invested Pope Sylvester with imperial au- 
thority in the West, and that it was on that 
account that Charlemagne knelt to receive the 
iron crown, is false. But at all events, from that 
time on, in spite of occasional conflicts, the two- 
fold idea of a world-monarchy and a world-church 
yielded support to both Papal and imperial despot- 
ism, till the subjugation of Christendom seemed 
to be complete. Nor did philosophy fail to lend 
its aid to this disastrous alliance. The influence of 
Realism in establishing a philosophical basis for 
absolutism, both in Church and State, has already 
been pointed out. 1 Under the influence of that 
philosophy, the individual was once more obliter- 

1 Lecture i. ; also Holy Roman Empire, p. 97. 



II.] To Civil Society. 



ated in religion and society. The despotic idea 
of the State was re-established, and at the same 
time the true idea of the Church as a divine theoc- 
racy was overthrown. By a perfectly logical retri- 
bution, the Church, in grasping at temporal 
authority, lost its true spiritual power, and, in 
seizing the kingdom of this world, placed itself in 
a position to be eventually enslaved by it. Mean- 
while the history of mediaeval European civiliza- 
tion was the record of much good commingled 
with no little evil ; and of the evil it is not too 
much to say, that most of it is directly attributable 
to the alliance of Church and State. 

Our present purpose requires us, however, to 
devote our attention chiefly to the development of 
the relation between Church and State in English 
history. Our limits will not permit us to study 
the many vicissitudes through which that relation 
passed under British, Saxon, and Danish princes, 
and under Plantagenet and Tudor kings. Nor can 
we consider the many questions, doctrinal and ec- 
clesiastical, which were settled or unsettled at the 
time of the English Reformation, further than as 
these have immediate bearing upon the relation be- 
tween the Church and the civil authority. It must 



66 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

suffice for us to point out, that while the English 
Church did reform its doctrines, and regain its 
ecclesiastical independence of the Papal despot- 
ism, it did not rescue itself from the tyranny of 
the civil power. Circumstances had all along 
been favorable to the maintenance of a close alli- 
ance between Church and State. In the long 
contest between the English Church and the 
Papacy, the State had usually been the bulwark 
of the Church against Papal aggression. In 
Magna Charta, in the Constitutions of Clarendon, 
in the Statute of Prcsmunire, the secular arm had 
undoubtedly been outstretched to defend the 
Church as well as the State against a foreign 
spiritual despotism. It was natural, therefore, at 
the Reformation, that the relations between 
Church and State should be made more intimate, 
and should exalt, rather than detract from, the 
sovereignty of the civil power. Accordingly, we 
find, that, when Henry VIII. claimed for him- 
self a supremacy in matters ecclesiastical which 
equalled the supremacy claimed and exercised by 
Constantine, the Church made but feeble resist- 
ance. The doctrine of the royal supremacy was 
pushed to its greatest extreme ; and the assump- 



ii.] To Civil Society. 67 

tions of the crown, after a verbal modification, 
were yielded to. 1 Though this doctrine was some- 
what softened, it was not really modified, in the 
reigns of Edward, Elizabeth, James, and Charles. 
Under its provisions the free Church of England, 
autonomous, apostolic, historic, reformed, con- 
sented to become a " Church established by law ; " 
to become, in some respects, a department of 
State; to be used for political purposes; to become 
the apologist and defender of political measures ; 
in a word, to do duty as an " Establishment : " and 
it is out of this unfortunate relation that most of 
the evils that have since afflicted the English 
Church have proceeded. 

Resistance to such an arrangement was inevit- 
able. Unfortunately, this resistance was allowed 
to organize itself outside of the Church instead 
of within it, and to become a movement hostile to 
the Church's order. Time does not permit us 
to do more than summarize the characteristics of 
the great Puritan re-action. Undoubtedly, it had 
its origin partly in doctrinal divergences ; and it 

1 Blunt: Reformation in England, pp. 111-134. Hardwick: History 
of the Christian Church during the Reformation, pp*. 191-193. Burnet: 
History of the Reformation, vol. i. pp. 112, 113. 



68 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

assumed a certain doctrinal type, with which at 
present we have nothing to do. It is also unde- 
niable, that it finally antagonized itself against the 
Church's order as well as against its organization. 
But no candid examination of the origin and prog- 
ress of Puritanism can escape the conclusion, that 
the whole movement, including Independency, 
was mainly political, and was directed against cer- 
tain evils that were attributed to the Establish- 
ment and to the doctrine of royal supremacy. 
The majority of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and 
early Caroline bishops consented to become the 
champions of the royal prerogative, of the doctrine 
of non-resistance, and of the divine right of kings. 1 
The supreme questions on which the Puritans and 
Independents antagonized the Church were politi- 
cal, and not religious. 2 James I. declared in Par- 
liament, that it was not on religious, but on politi- 
cal, grounds that the Puritans differed from himself 
and his supporters ; 3 and Cromwell distinctly and 
repeatedly declared in 1653, that the origin of the 
war was not religious.4 The undiscriminating 

1 Arnold : Lectures on Modern History, p. 232. 2 Ibid. 

3 Speech of James I. in Parliamentary History, vol. i. p. 982. 

4 Carlyle : Cromwell, vol. iii. p. 103. 



ii.] To Civil Society. 69 

espousal of the royal cause, with all its dangerous 
political and ecclesiastical pretensions, by Laud, 
and the rest of the hierarchy under Charles L, 
alienated large numbers of the people ; so that it 
may be said, that it was not against the Church, 
but against the Establishment, that the great Revo- 
lution directed its blind and iconoclastic fury. 
We shall hereafter have occasion to remark how 
Laud's zeal, not for the Church, but for the Estab- 
lishment, drove out many of the Church's chil- 
dren, some of whom came to America, and here 
essayed to establish a system that should be free 
from the evils inflicted by the archbishop's heavy 
hand. For the present it is enough to point out, 
that, in all those troublesome times, the Church 
was fighting battles not her own, and that the 
many evils of dissent and nonconformity by which 
she was so sore bestead were but the fruits of the 
unhappy alliance which she made with the king- 
dom of this world. 

It must not be forgotten, however, that, while 
the Puritans arrayed themselves against the Estab- 
lishment, it was not because they objected to the 
alliance or union of Church and State, but it was 
because they opposed the terms of the existing 



JO The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

alliance. They objected with good reason to the 
supremacy of the State over the Church ; but they 
desired to establish the opposite, and quite as 
objectionable, extreme, in making the Church su- 
preme over the State. In other words, they 
desired that the State should be administered on 
religious principles, and that they should define 
and apply those principles, — a theory of civil and 
religious liberty that* has not yet perished from 
the face of the earth. It is a noteworthy fact, that 
the Puritans would have remained in the Church 
on these terms, only stipulating that the hierarchy 
should be composed of Puritan bishops, and that 
the State should be subservient to them. For a 
long time it was the theory of the Puritans, that 
the civil power could be so reformed as to become 
a willing instrument in the hands of the "saints." 
But at length many of the stronger spirits among 
them grew weary of waiting for such an adjust- 
ment, and went off into the peculiar separatism 
called Independency. Subsequently many of the 
remaining Puritans became Presbyterians, because 
the bishops of the Church refused to accept their 
peculiar theocratic views ; and then the Church 
was assailed on both sides, because of her alliance 



ii.] To Civil Society. 71 

with the State. Circumstances, combined with 
the greater simplicity and consistency of their 
early political opinions, soon gave the predomi- 
nance of power to the Independents ; but it was 
yet too soon for any party to become the consist- 
ent advocates of a total separation of Church and 
State. When the Independents came into power, 
they soon developed a more bigoted and intoler- 
ant theory of theocratic government than the 
early Puritans. Cromwell seized the reins of 
power as the Lord's anointed, and based his claim 
to authority, not on the will of the people, but on 
the will of God. He united in his own person the 
office of civil and military dictator, of Pope, of 
emperor, and of Pontifex Maximns, and under- 
took to rule the consciences of men with quite as 
firm a hand as he ruled their conduct. 1 Indeed, 
so odious did this tyranny become, in matters both 
civil and religious, that it soon became apparent 
that the old Establishment was better than the 
new theocracy ; 2 and the Presbyterians united with 
Churchmen, and all the sincerest friends of liberty 
throughout the realm, in bringing back the exiled 
Stuarts to the English throne. 

1 Carlyle : Cromwell, vol. iii. 105 et seq. 

2 Hume : History of England, vol. vii. pp. 258-308. 



72 The Relation of Christianity [lect. 

The Revolution of 1688, and the subsequent set- 
tlement of the Hanoverian succession, developed 
yet another stage in the adjustment of the rela- 
tion between Church and State. At the Restora- 
tion the old doctrines of non-resistance, of the 
royal supremacy, and of the divine right of kings, 
re-appeared with increased vigor ; and, as was 
natural, the clergy, and especially the bishops, 
became the defenders of them. It was indeed 
quite natural that the hierarchy that had suffered 
and gone into exile with the house of Stuart, and 
now had been restored with the king, should iden- 
tify the rights and authority of the Church with 
the royal cause, and refuse to distinguish between 
loyalty to the Church and loyalty to the king. 
Accordingly, when, after the Revolution of 1688, 
it became necessary to take the oaths to William 
and Mary, and to renounce the house of Stuart, 
five bishops, including the primate, submitted to 
deprivation rather than make the distinction. 
The vacant sees were at once filled with prelates 
who took a more liberal, and, as we can see, a 
more just and sound, view of the matter. With 
the surrender of the old doctrine of divine right, 
on which the claims of the house of Stuart 



II.] To Civil Society. 73 

rested, it became necessary to establish a new 
doctrine of the true basis of civil society. This 
was undertaken by Locke, 1 who was followed by 
Hoadley 2 and Warburton,3 who elaborated with 
great learning what is called the social-compact 
theory of government, — a theory, which, it is not 
too much to say, embodied the principles long 
before set in operation by the gospel of Christ, 
registered the results of the Nominalistic philos- 
ophy, and led on to the establishment on these 
shores of civil liberty.4 Unhappily, however, the 
great and philosophical thinkers who did this 
service for the State, were not free to plead for 
the Church's liberty also. The burden of the 
Establishment still weighed down the Church's 
life.5 The concordat between Church and State 
was undisturbed, and still remains in force ; 6 and 
later English writers and thinkers, who were well 

1 Locke : Of Government, and Of Civil Government. 

2 Bishop Hoadley : The Original and Institution of Civil Government. 

3 Bishop Warburton : The Alliance between Church and State, bk i. 

4 The reader is referred to the admirable notes of Bishop Whittingham 
to Palmer's Treatise on the Church, vol. ii. pp. 291-342. 

5 See the works of Locke, Hoadley, and Warburton, above referred to. 

6 For an accurate statement of the terms of the actual existing 
concordat between Church and State in England, see an able article in the 
British Critic for April, 1839, art. iii. pp. 321-367. 



74 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

qualified by their correct views, both of civil soci- 
ety and of the Church's historic and theocratic 
constitution, to take the only consistent view of 
the relation between them, have been limited by 
the condition of being required to defend the 
Establishment, either on principle or from ex- 
pediency. 1 For this reason the true relation be- 
tween Christianity and civil society — as to be 
seen only from the Churchman's stand-point — has 
yet to be defined in English Christian literature. 
I believe that more auspicious conditions sur- 
round our inquiry, and that on these shores, and 
for the first time in centuries of political and 
ecclesiastical strife, there is room and opportunity 
for true Christian statesmanship. I also ven- 
ture to believe, that such statesmanship must 
sooner or later occupy the point of view of the 
American Churchman, who, while he holds that 
the Church is a theocracy, also holds that the 
State is merely a secular and social compact, 
though not the less authoritative for that reason ; 
and who believes that we, in this land, are in a 

x See Mr. Gladstone's The State in its Relations with the Church, chap. 
iv. Also Bishop Warburton's Alliance between Church and State, part 
ii. sect. iii. 



II.] To Civil Society. 75 

condition freely to realize the relation between 
Christianity and civil society indicated by Christ 
himself, when he uttered the words so often and 
so long misunderstood, " Render unto Caesar the 
things which are Caesar's, and unto God the 
things that are God's." 



LECTURE III. 

THE ANSWER OF CHRIST, AND THE DEVEL- 
OPMENTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 



LECTURE III. 

THE ANSWER OF CHRIST, AND THE DEVELOPMENTS 
OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

"If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend." — St. John 

xix. 12. 

r I ^HE charge which the Jews preferred against 
■*■ Jesus — that, in making himself a king, he 
put himself and his kingdom into opposition to 
the Caesar and his imperial power — was both 
false and true. It was false in the sense in which 
the Jews intended it. It was true in a deeper 
sense than they or Pilate could understand. Jesus 
had already completely renounced all claim to 
sovereignty over the kingdoms of this world ; and 
it was the capital fault which the Jews found in 
him, that he had made and persisted in such 
renunciation. Not only so, but with equal per- 
sistency he had refused, both to ally himself with 
and to antagonize the civil power, upon the ground 
so little understood in that day and since, that his 
"kingdom is not of this world." The conspicu- 

79 



80 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

ous indifference of Jesus to temporal honors, and 
his utter refusal of temporal authority, even when 
his countrymen were eager to thrust it upon him, 
were sufficient evidence of the falseness and 
malignity of the charge that was made against 
him. Nevertheless, it was true that there was 
an irreconcilable antagonism between the theo- 
cratic imperialism of the Caesar and the gospel 
of the kingdom of God. In that gospel a prin- 
ciple was set in operation among men, that was 
sure, sooner or later, to work human emanci- 
pation. It was a principle, that in individualizing 
man, in awaking him to a realizing sense of his 
personal dignity and personal responsibility, and 
in raising him by faith and through grace "into 
the glorious liberty of the children of God," was, 
sooner or later, to render all human tyrannies 
utterly intolerable, — a principle which, unless the 
Church had unworthily consented in a woful 
after-time to surrender it, would long since have 
banished Caesarism, with its preposterous claim 
of divine right, from the face of the earth. There 
was a profound and irreconcilable issue, then, 
between Christianity and the theocratic imperial- 
ism of the Caesar; but it was not to be settled 



in.] To Civil Society. 81 

in Pilate's judgment-hall : nor did Pilate, or the 
noisy mob who clamored before the prcetorium for 
the "innocent blood," understand that issue at 
all. It was not to be settled by condemning 
Jesus the king, nor by smiting him to death. It 
was not to be settled by the stroke of fiery perse- 
cutions, nor by the oppositions of either supersti- 
tion or philosophy. It was not to be settled by 
the surrender of the Christian Church to the 
same haughty and theocratic imperialism in the 
person of Constantine, emperor and " Pontifex 
Maximns" It was not to be settled by the estab- 
lishment of the daring claim of the Papacy to 
supreme temporal and spiritual power. It was 
not to be settled by the resumption in Eng- 
land of imperial supremacy over the Church by 
English kings. It was not to be settled by the 
erection of the revolutionary theocracy of the 
Commonwealth upon the ruins of such suprem- 
acy. It was not to be settled in any alliance 
between Church and State, any more than in the 
triumph of either over the other ; but it was to 
be settled in the adjustment finally to be made 
between membership and discipleship in a purely 
spiritual and theocratic kingdom on the one hand, 



82 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

and citizenship in a purely secular and civil soci- 
ety on the other. 

I need not recapitulate what has been said 
already of the evils which resulted from the 
Church's surrender to Constantine, and from 
the subsequent development of Byzantinism and 
the Papacy. From the last of these the English 
Church was happily freed at the Reformation, but 
it was not her happiness then to escape from the 
tyranny of the temporal power. Indeed, under 
the virtual concordat then and subsequently forced 
upon her, she has been compelled to do duty as 
an Establishment, and too often to become the 
instrument of, and the apologist for, the arbitrary 
and tyrannical exercise of the civil authority. The 
peculiar calamity of this most unhappy conjunc- 
tion cannot be exaggerated. For centuries the 
English Church has occupied a false position, and 
has been held responsible for the very oppression 
of which she herself has been the worst victim. It 
is difficult for an American Churchman 'to repress 
a feeling of sorrowful indignation when he remem- 
bers how our mother Church has been used by 
many a despotic cabal under Tudor and Stuart 
and Hanoverian, by Whig and Tory administra- 



in.] To Civil Society. 83 

tions, by secularist and infidel ministries, to serve 
ends utterly alien to her true polity, and to further 
purposes, which, if her true voice could have been 
heard, she would have renounced as utterly un- 
worthy,. It is a truth which cannot, I believe, 
be too much insisted on, that almost all the evils 
which have afflicted and still afflict English Chris- 
tianity have been caused or provoked by the bur- 
den of the royal supremacy which the English 
Church has had thrust upon her. In consenting 
to do duty as a Church established by law, she 
has apparently identified herself and* her fortunes 
with a merely human power. It was against this 
arrangement, and the policy which resulted from 
it, and not necessarily against the Church as 
Christ's kingdom, that English nonconformity 
was first arrayed, until such nonconformity was 
in some instances driven out by the secular arm, 
and made strong and formidable by persecution. 
So calamitous was this ill-omened alliance, that the 
revolution which first hurled the Stuart dynasty 
from the throne dragged the Church down with 
it ; and it was not till the Stuarts were finally 
banished from the kingdom, that the Church was 
delivered from the task, long so servilely per- 



84 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

formed, of defending the divine right of kings. 
With the accession of William and Mary, the 
Church was free and prompt to assume a truer 
relation to the State ; and it will remain an imper- 
ishable honor to the English Church, that some 
of her bishops were among the first to enunciate 
formally the great truth, that the authority of civil 
government is derived solely from the consent of 
the governed, and so to lay down the true basis 
of civil society. 1 But, in the mean time, even 
before the Church was free to formulate this prin- 
ciple, her children were engaged, beneath other 
skies, in its practical realization. Meantime a 
great movement was begun out of England toward 
a vast continent, which for long centuries had 
been hidden in the West, as if reserved to be the 
forum in which all the questions which had hith- 
erto vexed the world should find their final adjudi- 
cation. Hither the sons of English Christianity 
came to work out, for the most part unconsciously, 
and even in spite of their own obstructive methods, 
the great experiment of human liberty. And here, 
under these open heavens, I believe the world is 
destined to witness for the first time in history 

1 Hoadley and Warburton. 



in.] To Civil Society. 85 

the establishment of the true relation between 
Christianity and civil society. 

A brief consideration, then, of some of the most 
important influences that were active in shaping 
the beginnings of our national life, will be indis- 
pensable to our present purpose. And the first 
remark that I make in this connection is, that the 
impulse which began, and in large measure ac- 
complished, the colonization of our territory, was 
mainly commercial, and not political or religious. 
The age of the Reformation was distinguished by 
a great outburst of energy, which signalized itself, 
under Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and James I., in 
maritime adventure, commercial enterprise, and 
especially in those great colonizing movements 
which attested the restlessness of the age and 
the vigor of the English people. The earliest 
attempts at American colonization had no connec- 
tion whatever with political or religious discon- 
tent. When we remember that Virginia, the 
Carolinas, Georgia, and New York were settled 
wholly in obedience to this commercial and colo- 
nizing instinct, it will be seen how groundless is 
the claim, that the beginnings of our national life 
were due to political or religious grievances in the 



86 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

mother country. When it is observed, moreover, 
that the colonies, like Virginia and the Carolinas, 
which confessedly were not planted by religious 
or political propagandism, were at least as forward 
in the development and establishment of civil and 
religious liberty as were those, like Massachusetts 
and Connecticut, which were settled from alleged 
religious and political motives, we see reason for 
concluding that the direction and development of 
our national life towards the realization of liberty 
were shaped and determined, not so much by the 
original impulses which drove the colonists hither, 
or by any of them, as by the peculiar circum- 
stances which taught independence and self-reli- 
ance to all the colonists alike. No doubt, there 
were Puritan colonies and Quaker plantations and 
Lutheran settlements : but, then, there were 
Church-of-England colonies also ; and when we 
find a Church-of-England colony, like Virginia for 
instance, actually leading in the race and in the 
fight for freedom, and that, too, from the very be- 
ginning, it will not do to say that any separatist 
religious impulse, like Puritanism or Independ- 
ency for instance, was the sole source, or even a 
distinguishing source, from which our liberties have 



in.] To Civil Society, 87 

sprung. Nay, — for our argument is cumulative, 
— the very fact that anti-Puritan Virginia did ac- 
tually outstrip Puritan Massachusetts in the race 
for liberty, as we shall have occasion to notice 
presently, suggests the fact, which is otherwise 
verifiable, that it was not because of Puritanism, 
but rather in spite of it, that our liberties were 
achieved at last. And the same is true of each of 
the characteristic religious movements of the pe- 
riod. If Puritanism had succeeded in carrying 
out it's plans, we should have had no civil or reli- 
gious liberty at all; but we should have had a 
pure theocracy of the most despotic type, in which 
the "saints," led by their ministers, would have 
ruled with iron hand the temporal and spiritual 
affairs of the commonwealth. If the Quaker idea 
had prevailed, we should have had religi'ous tolera- 
tion indeed of every thing but a Church; since 
the tendencies of Quakerism would have abolished 
the Church altogether, and made the State take its 
place. If the Establishment idea had prevailed, 
we should have had such an alliance of Church 
and State as still exists in England. But neither 
of these ideas prevailed. The movement towards 
civil and religious liberty was due to none of 



88 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

them, but was rather due to the removal of facti- 
tious restraint and traditional hinderances from all 
the colonists alike ; to the throwing of them alike 
upon the responsibilities of Christian manhood, 
and the leaving of them free, as men, to yield to 
the impulses which move Christian men to organ- 
ize civil society. 

The simple truth is, that the very emigration 
of the colonists was their emancipation. No 
matter what impulse drove them forth from the 
mother-land, it exiled them into liberty ; and the 
broad Atlantic kept watch and ward over them 
while they realized and appropriated their liberty 
in the institutions of a free State. An examina- 
tion of the early history of all the colonies will 
disclose the fact, that each one of them was prac- 
tically free, almost from the very beginning, to 
frame its own government, and to make that gov- 
ernment representative of and responsible to the 
people. More than a year before the Pilgrims 
landed at Plymouth, the colonists of Virginia had 
actually organized a government which was prac- 
tically as free, and as responsible to themselves, 
as was the government provided for by the famous 
covenant drawn up in the cabin of "The May- 



in.] To Civil Society. 89 

flower." J And so it will be seen, that just as fast 
as the settlers on these shores realized their inde- 
pendence, and their need of self-reliance and -of 
the mutual protection of social order, they pro- 
ceeded to organize civil society for themselves, as 
a social compact, and as deriving its authority 
really from the consent of the governed. 
Though attempts were made in the first instance 
to impose institutions upon the colonists from the 
mother-land, as, for instance, in the earlier proprie- 
tary charters, and in the famous plan of govern- 
ment drawn up for South Carolina by Locke and 
Shaftesbury ; yet in every case those cumbersome 
and useless forms were speedily outgrown and 
swept aside, and the people were practically left 
free to organize society for themselves. The colo- 
nists were in a manner forced to realize their indi- 
viduality, with the sense of personal dignity and 
personal responsibility belonging to it ; and they 
were moved to organize self-government, both 
by the dangers and necessities which pressed 
upon them from without, and by the social and 

1 -Bancroft: History of the United States, vol. i. pp. 118, 119. It is 
to be noted, that the references to Bancroft's History are all made to the 
edition of 1879, Little, Brown, & Co., Boston, 



90 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

civil instinct which impelled them from within. 
Such hinderances as were interposed by proprie- 
tary councils and colonial governors were quietly 
ignored or forcibly put aside, and the more inti- 
mate and formidable hinderances of traditional 
opinion were quietly outgrown. With occasional 
disturbances and retrogressions, but with general 
and remarkable vigor, the colonists moved on 
towards the fuller and more complete realization 
of popular government. For the first time in the 
world's history the august spectacle was seen of 
free and equal men acting in accordance with 
their own social and civil instincts, and organiz- 
ing free and responsible civil society, the sanction 
and authority of which were to rest wholly on 
their own consent. And the interest and dignity 
of this great movement are only enhanced by the 
fact, that, for the most part, it was engaged in 
almost unconsciously by the actors themselves. 
It is not too much to say, that the colonists grew 
into freedom, and, all along, were building wiser 
than they knew. It has been- well said, that the 
New-England colonists came over to build a Zion, 
and to this end they directed all their conscious 
efforts ; but all the while it was not a Zion, but a 



in.] To Civil Society. 91 

State, that they were building. 1 So in Massachu- 
setts and Virginia, in Connecticut and Carolina, 
in New York and Pennsylvania, the colonists were 
led, not by their conscious ideals, but often in 
spite of them, to build a great government of the 
people, by the people, and for the people, to be a 
home for the aspiring and a refuge for the op- 
pressed of the human race. It is a salutary cor- 
rective of much that we have been hearing for 
many years past, to remember, that it was not in 
Puritan New England, but in cavalier Virginia, 
that the plant of liberty grew most rapidly, and 
soonest bore its ripened fruit. It was George 
Mason, the stanch and devout Virginia Church- 
man, who drew up the Declaration of Rights that 
was subsequently embodied, but not improved or 
enlarged, in the Declaration of Independence ; 
and Mason's Declaration was unanimously adopted 
by the Virginia colonial legislature, a vast major- 
ity of whom were Churchmen. And not only was 
this the first and most notable declaration of civil 
liberty, but it was the very first declaration of 
religious liberty as well : for, scores of years 
before the laws of religious intolerance were ex- 

1 Lowell : New England Two Centuries Ago, p. 238. 



92 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

punged from the statute-books of Massachusetts 
and Connecticut, the Virginia House of Burgesses 
declared in this immortal document, that "Reli- 
gion can be directed only by reason and convic- 
tion, and not by force and violence ; and therefore 
all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of 
it according to the dictates of conscience ; and it 
is the mutual duty of all to practise Christian 
forbearance, love, and charity towards each 
other." * 

The achievement of religious liberty, indeed, 
was a far more difficult and complicated task than 
the accomplishment of civil freedom. In order to 
understand it, we must consider briefly the three 
principal schools of religious thought which con- 
ditioned the problem in the different colonies. 
These were Puritanism, Quakerism, and Angli- 
canism ; meaning by the last, that relation to the 
Establishment which was sustained by all Church- 
men in colonial times. Let us consider these in 
the order named. 

We have seen that Puritanism, as it developed 
itself in England under Elizabeth and James, was 
formally theological and philosophical, but was 

1 Bancroft : History of the United States, vol. v. pp. 260-262. 



in.] To Civil Society. 93 

really political. In its own consciousness, how- 
ever, it was altogether religious, and took on the 
type, as it advanced, of a stern and gloomy fanati- 
cism. With its theological opinions and religious 
character we have here nothing to do, except as 
these affected its relations to the State or civil 
society. The mass of the Puritans were not origi- 
nally opposed to the hierarchy. Indeed, several 
of the bishops themselves belonged to the Puritan 
party. Nor were the Puritans opposed to the 
alliance of Church and State. They only insisted 
on inverting the terms of that alliance so as to 
make the State entirely subservient to the Church. 
Their complaint was, that the civil power would 
not carry the Reformation to the lengths which 
they desired ; and for a long time their hope was, 
that the State might be reduced to such subjec- 
tion to them as to become obedient to their 
wishes. A few of the most earnest and devout 
soon relinquished this hope, and became separat- 
ists under the name of Independents. These, in 
theory at least, soon began to call for the abroga- 
tion of the Establishment, on the ground that all 
alliance between the civil and religious power was 
indefensible. In point of fact, their real purpose 



94 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

was, to destroy both the Establishment and the 
State, and to substitute therefor a kingdom of the 
" saints," in which Church and State should be 
merged into one. It may be said, however, that 
with this phase of Puritanism we have but little 
concern. It soon ran its course under the Com- 
monwealth, — a movement, which, while it signal- 
ized the greatness of its leaders, will always be 
ranked as one of the completest failures in history. 
Nor need we make more than a passing reference 
to that noted colony of separatists, which, leaving 
Northern England, went first to Amsterdam, and 
then to Leyden, and from thence despatched the 
illustrious little company of Pilgrims which came 
in "The Mayflower" to these shores. No one can 
be insensible to the romantic and poetic interest 
that belongs to the goodly little band, who, 
throughout the whole course of their wanderings, 
set an example of constancy, and greatness of soul, 
that were worthy of the faith's best ages, — of 
whom their pious leader well said, that " they knew 
they were pilgrims, and looked not much on the 
things of earth, but lifted up their eyes to heaven, 
their dearest country, and quieted their spirits." * 

1 Bancroft: History of the United States, vol. i. p. 235. 



in.] To Civil Society. 95 

Deeply touched, however, as all must be, by the 
idyllic grace of the story of the Pilgrims, and 
pleasant as it is to linger over it, yet candor com- 
pels us to acknowledge, that the true genesis of 
New-England colonial life is not to be traced to 
Plymouth, and that the Pilgrims had no direct and 
but little indirect influence in shaping its later 
development. The true beginning of New-Eng- 
land colonial life was originally projected by 
Arthur Lake, Bishop of Bath and Wells, one of 
the Puritan prelates of the English Church. So 
greatly was the bishop interested in the move- 
ment, that he declared, shortly before his death, 
that "he would go himself, but for his age." 1 
The plan projected by him was carried out later 
by his coadjutor and friend, the Rev. John White, 
"the patriarch minister of Dorchester," and, like 
Lake, a Puritan, but not a separatist, who, with 
Roger Conant, succeeded in 1625 in planting the 
colony of Salem on the Bay of Massachusetts. 2 

1 Bancroft : History of the United States, vol. i. p. 264. Also A 
Dying Father's Last Legacy to an Only Child ; or, Mr. Hugh Peters's 
Advice to His Daughter, pp. 101, 102, London, 1660. Also Felt's Eccle- 
siastical History of New England, pp. 79, So. It is to be noted, that this 
important statement is in the latest, but not in the earlier, editions of 
Bancroft, 

2 Bancroft : History of the United States, vol. i. p. 264. 



g6 The Relation of CJiristianity [Lect. 

Few, if any, of the original colonists were separat- 
ists. Among their leaders and most active sup- 
porters were the Rev. Samuel Skelton of Clare 
Hall, Cambridge ; and the Rev. Francis Higginson 
of Jesus College, Cambridge, both in English 
orders, though Puritans. 1 It is to be noted, more- 
over, that, soon after the later settlement of the 
colony at Boston, none but clergymen in regular 
orders were elected and set apart to minister to 
the congregation. 2 Soon afterwards, indeed, the 
churches of the colony proceeded to elaborate an 
organization different from that of the English 
Church, and more in accordance with the organ- 
ization of the Independents ; but it is easy to see 
that this was designed at first to be a departure, 
rather from the organization of the Establishment 
than from the Church's order. Two of their num- 
ber, John and Samuel Browne, protested against 
even this departure ; and they were promptly si- 
lenced and expelled : but, in doing this, the Puri- 
tans declared that their purpose was, to separate, 
"not from the Church of England, but from its 

1 Prince: p. 191 (note). 

2 Bancroft: History of the United States, vol. i. pp. 271, 182. Prince: 
p. 191 (note). 



in.] To Civil Society. 97 

corruptions." ' At the re-organization of the struc- 
ture of the colony a little later, when the home 
council transferred "the government of the colony 
to those who^ should inhabit there," 2 John Win- 
throp of Groton in Sussex, a Churchman and a 
conformist, though a Puritan, was elected gov- 
ernor ; and he soon drew around him a large num- 
ber of like-minded men, whose purpose was, not to 
separate from either Church or State, but to realize 
the Puritan ideal of an alliance between them. 3 
Under the fresh impulse given by Winthrop and 
his companions, the Colony of Massachusetts Bay 
began to shape the destiny of New England. 
Boston was chosen as the seat of government; 
and the First Church of Boston was organized by 
electing the Rev. John Wilson for their pastor, 
who, while submitting to the imposition of their 
hands as a solemn setting apart for his work, 
refused to renounce the regular orders already 
received by him in England.4 Thus it was that 
Puritanism was transplanted to these shores, and 

1 Bancroft : History of the United States, vol. i. pp. 272, 273. 

2 Ibid. p. 274. 

3 Bancroft : History of the United States, vol. i. pp. 277, 278. Pal- 
frey: History of New England, vol. i. pp. 311-313. 

* Bancroft : History of the United States, vol. i. p. 282. 



98 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

began its career here, not as a separation from 
the English Church, but as a movement towards 
the attainment of that control of the State by the 
"elect " which had come to be the object of Puri- 
tan ambition. 

As time passed on, this object eclipsed all 
others. In 1631 the Puritans proceeded to enact, 
that "no man for the time to come should be 
admitted to the freedom of the body politic but 
such as are members of some of the churches 
within the limits of the same." "Thus," says 
Bancroft, " the body became a theocracy : God 
himself was to govern his people ; and the ' saints 
by calling/ whose names an immutable decree 
had registered from eternity as the objects of 
divine love, whose election had been visibly man- 
ifested by their conscious experience of religion 
in the heart, whose aim was confirmed by the 
most solemn compact formed with heaven and 
one another around the memorials of a crucified 
Redeemer, were, by the fundamental laws of 
the colony, constituted the oracle of the divine 
will." 1 The same writer also calls it "the reign 
of the visible Church, a commonwealth of the 

1 Bancroft : History of the United States, vol. i. p. 288. 



hi.] To Civil Society. 99 

chosen people in covenant with God." " To the 
more complete and speedy realization of this 
theocratic purpose, the Puritans proceeded to 
sacrifice the religious ties that bound them to the 
mother Church. Whoever opposed or refused to 
fall in with their plans, was set upon, punished, 
and expelled. Roger Williams, one of the purest 
and most gifted souls of that or any age, was igno- 
miniously exiled because he pleaded for liberty of 
conscience. Quakers were proscribed and ban- 
ished. Tender and gentle Quaker women were 
scourged. 2 Nonconformity was treated as treason ; 
and a tyranny more inexorable and severe than that 
with which the Establishment, in its most perse- 
cuting days, had visited dissent, was set up by the 
Puritans in New England. Whoever will study 
the annals of the New-England colonies, and the 
long lists, both of Churchmen and nonconformists, 
who suffered for conscience in early colonial days, 
will see that Puritanism, with all its stern virtues, 
was not the friend, but the foe, of liberty ; and 
that its sons and daughters passed on to freedom, 
not because, but in spite, of their creed. 

1 Bancroft: History of the United States, vol. i. p. 288. 

2 George Bishop : New England Judged, p. 50. London, 1703. 



ioo The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

As the instinct of civil liberty was strong 
enough among the Puritans themselves to over- 
come the narrow bigotry of their religious and 
political opinions, so the cause of religious liberty 
was gradually relieved of its worst hinderances. 
Among the causes which contributed to this result, 
a prominent place must be assigned to the influ- 
ence of Roger Williams and the generous spirits 
associated with him, who, from the secure pro- 
tection afforded by the little commonwealth of 
Rhode Island and Providence Plantation, organ- 
ized and directed a ceaseless propagandism against 
the stern policy of their neighbors. But the 
most important was the gradual decay of Puritan- 
ism itself, the exhaustion of its energy, the spend- 
ing of its force. Like all mere schools of opinion, 
it could not last. Like all mere human systems, 
it waxed old, and was ready to vanish away. 
From the time when it finally separated from the 
Church's order, it began to lose its consistency, 
and to evaporate its early spirit ; and it eventually 
came to pass, that large numbers of its people 
re-acted into open or covert Unitarianism, or .other 
forms of liberalism and indifference. At the time 
of the American Revolution, Puritanism, as such, 



in.] To Civil Society. 101 

did not have a word to say for itself in the coun- 
cils of the Continental Congress. The shackles 
of bigotry had already fallen from the people's 
minds. Though the forms of theocratic tyranny 
remained long unrepealed, and though the spirit 
of it still manifests itself in many kinds of rest- 
less propagandism ; yet the mass of the New- 
England people grew up unconsciously into a 
better freedom, both civil and religious, than their 
leaders aimed at, and, like their brethren in every 
colony, builded wiser than they knew. 

The influence of Quakerism on the growth and 
development of our religious liberty is a subject 
of surpassing interest, deserving of far more time 
and space than can be here accorded to it. It 
must suffice to point out, that its noblest function 
was amply discharged in its earliest days. Then 
it was the apostleship of universal toleration ; and 
it retaught the great lessons of the gospel, so long 
obscured or forgotten, of the mightiness of meek- 
ness, the dignity of conscience, the royalty of 
self-sacrifice. Nothing had been seen in this 
world for more than a thousand years so beautiful 
as the spirit of early Quakerism, as manifested in 
George Fox and William Penn. There was pro- 



102 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

found truth, as well as touching sweetness, in the 
eulogy which the latter pronounced when he 
heard of the former's death : " Many Friends have 
done virtuously, but thou, George, hast excelled 
them all ! " There is no brighter page in political 
history than that which tells of the generous 
enterprise of William Penn in founding and long 
sustaining this great commonwealth and this 
noble metropolis. Long may it be before his 
memory shall cease to be venerated here, and his 
quiet spirit to pervade the social and public life 
of this City of Brotherly Love ! Yet, when we 
come to study Quakerism as a movement, we find 
that it contained in its bosom a germ of* subtle 
hostility to the very religious liberty which it 
honestly professed to serve. It contemned the 
Church's order, and renounced her sacraments. 
It refused to acknowledge any external religious 
authority. It insisted that all that was reasonable 
in objective Christianity was capable of being 
.embodied in the institutions of civil society, and 
it insisted on respecting nothing that was not so 
embodied. So it came to pass, that its toleration 
was seen to mean little more than a philosophical 
forbearance ; and that its spirit would have led, 



in.] To Civil Society. 103 

if uncontrolled, to a contemptuous sweeping away 
of all religious systems whatever, — to a complete 
secularization of Christianity. Such a tendency 
was well designed to abolish the Church, but 
manifestly it could not have been trusted to estab- 
lish relations between it and civil society. 

Lastly, we must consider briefly the effect of 
Anglicanism, meaning by this term the attach- 
ment of colonial Churchmen to the English 
Establishment. Undoubtedly, the first attitude 
of Anglicanism in Virginia and the Carolinas, 
and later in Maryland and New York, was hostile 
to religious liberty. No word of excuse shall 
ever be offered by me for the proscription for 
opinion's sake which was enacted in those col- 
onies. And yet it cannot be denied, that such 
proscription was rather political than religious, 
and always lacked the bitterness of religious 
fanaticism. The consequence was, that, as fast 
as the Anglican colonists outgrew their original 
subserviency to political prerogative, their pre- 
scriptive enactments fell into complete desuetude. 
Hence it was that Anglicanism did not retard the 
development of religious liberty to the same ex- 
tent, and in the same way, as was done by the 



104 The Relation of Christianity £Lect. 

stern Puritanism of Massachusetts Bay. Allusion 
has already been made to the fact, that it was in 
Virginia that the Declaration of Rights, which was 
the first authoritative proclamation of civil and 
religious liberty in any land, was enacted ; that it 
was written by George Mason, a devout commu- 
nicant of the Church ; and that it was unani- 
mously adopted by the Virginia House of Bur- 
gesses, the large majority of whom were also 
Churchmen. That Churchmen should thus take 
the lead was no accident. It was easier for a 
Churchman to sever the alliance between religion 
and civil society, because to him Christianity 
stood on ground altogether different from, that 
occupied by the State. He believed that the 
Church was a theocracy, instituted and upheld by 
a living King ; and that Christianity, being the 
Church's concern, did not need to either lean 
upon or to control the State. Having come to 
understand that the State is purely secular, while 
the Church is altogether spiritual ; that the State 
is altogether human, and the Church altogether 
divine, — he had no fears that either the one or the 
other would suffer by the separation. Therefore 
it was perfectly natural that George Mason, the 



in.] To Civil Society. 105 

« 
Churchman, should have written the Declaration 

which was the true charter of our national free- 
dom ; and there was a natural fitness in the fact, 
that the Continental Congress, which began the 
work of achieving our freedom, was opened with 
prayer by a clergyman of the Church, and that 
the patriot army which won our freedom was com- 
manded by a son of the Church. In strict consist- 
ency with the same line of events, the Church, 
being rescued here for the first time in long 
centuries from the burden and the tyranny of 
State control, began a gracious career in this 
country after the war, and gave singular evidence, 
by the promptness and completeness with which 
she adapted her organization to the framework 
of the State, by the readiness with which she 
took up her great work, by her cordial sympathy 
with our free institutions, and by a consistent pol- 
icy of non-interference with all questions merely 
civic and political, that this free land is the 
Church's home ; that she has found here the 
liberty for which her children long had sighed 
in every clime ; and that she is able, by reason of 
her divinely constituted polity and her unchan- 
ging order, to serve the commonwealth without 



io6 • The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

being enslaved by it, and to help it without in- 
truding into its councils, or interfering with its 
power. Hither, then, to the asylum of liberty, 
the refuge of the oppressed, came the Church of 
God. Long Pope-ridden in former centuries, long 
State-ridden in the mother-land, here the chains 
fell from her limbs ; and it will be her gracious 
part in the future, as in the past, to testify to her 
sense -of the sacredness of her own freedom, and 
of the freedom of the State, by exemplifying in 
her history the answer of her King, who said 
of old, " My kingdom is not of this world." " My 
kingdom is not from hence." 

Historically, then, we have seen that the rela- 
tion of Christianity to civil society in this land is 
not the relation which Puritanism would have 
chosen ; nor is it that which Quakerism would 
have preferred ; nor yet is it that which is exem- 
plified in the English Establishment. The actual 
outcome, has been perfect religious liberty. And 
this arises, not from the toleration of all religions 
alike by a State, which, in tolerating, assumes to 
patronize them all ; nor does it arise out of a mere 
equilibrium of religious or sectarian forces, the 
prudent refusal of the State to interfere among 



III.] To Civil Society. 107 

warring factions ; but it arises out of the very con- 
ception of civil society as a social compact be- 
tween men acting in obedience to the moral and 
social instincts of their nature, and deriving all 
civil authority from the consent of the governed. 
In a word, it is because the State is here placed 
upon a purely secular basis that all alliance with, 
or patronage of, or control over or control by, 
Christianity as a spiritual religion is impossible. 
In order to change this, it would be necessary to 
remodel the State, — to make it something different 
from what it now is ; and to do this would be 
to utterly overthrow our liberty. I believe that 
the relation of Christianity to civil society in this 
country is the ideal relation that was present to 
the thought of Jesus. I believe that all Chris- 
tian history has been leading up to the possibility 
of the establishment of this relation. I believe 
that it is being more and more realized as Chris- 
tians awake to the fact that the State is secular 
and human, and that the Church is spiritual and 
divine. But I believe that there are tendencies 
abroad, some re-actionary . and others radical in 
their character, which gravely threaten to suspend 
it, if not to destroy it altogether. Let us recur for 



108 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

a moment to a definition of that relation which 
has been suggested already, and then indicate 
some of the dangers which threaten it. 

Christianity, then, is personal loyalty to Christ 
as a divine and living king, manifested in the 
obedience of discipleship, and maintained by com- 
munion with him in sacrament and prayer. Into 
this relation with Christ, man is called as an indi- 
vidual : he enters into it by faith and through 
grace. By it he is recognized as the only ethical 
subject. By its cult he is individualized, dignified, 
saved. Yet the inevitable effect of this is, to bind 
him more closely to his kind ; to develop his social 
instinct into love for his neighbor ; and to enable 
him to find his own completeness, not in isolation 
from his fellows, but in association with them, — 
not in selfishness, but in brotherly kindness. 
Christianity, then, begins with Christ, and, through 
the individual, leads back to him. Civil society, 
on the other hand, begins with the individual. It 
has its genesis in the social instincts and needs of 
the individual man, who, combining with others in 
obedience to those instincts, and in order to serve 
those needs, proceeds to organize an instrumen- 
tality which shall serve the common purposes 



in.] To Civil Society. 109 

which he and his associates have in view ; which 
instrumentality he calls a State, or government, 
or civil society. But this civil society, having 
its genesis in man, and deriving its authority from 
him, has its excellence measured solely by its 
capacity to serve him, and finds its end in him. 
At this point, then, and at this point alone, 
namely, in the individual, Christianity and civil 
society touch each other. The great concern 
of Christianity is the culture of the individual 
man, the training of him for immortality. But 
inasmuch as man can, by reason of the social 
characteristics of his nature, attain to his true 
individuality only in association with his fellows, 
and inasmuch as it is the effect of Christianity to 
enlarge man's social instincts, and expand as well 
as dignify man's social nature, Christianity enters 
through this culture into the most intimate rela- 
tions with civil society. Nevertheless, in pursu- 
ing this culture, Christianity is not only protected 
by its origin and authority from all control by the 
State, but it is prohibited, by the very character 
of its legitimate influence, from exercising any 
control over the State. For to control the State 
would be to destroy man's political nature, and to 



HO The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

defeat the impulses towards society which its 
design, as we have seen, is to re-enforce, and not 
to abrogate or destroy. From this it appears that 
a theocratic Church and a secular State mutually 
so limit each other as to forbid the interference of 
each with the other. 

There are, however, three tendencies abroad 
which aim at the disturbance of this adjustment, 
and which, in the event of the complete success 
of any one of them, must destroy it altogether. 
Our limits will allow us only to refer to them in 
the briefest way. The first of these may be de- 
scribed as the surviving political spirit of Puri- 
tanism. We have seen how the Puritans at first 
aimed at nothing short of the control of the 
State by the Church, the subordination of the 
civil to the ecclesiastical power. We have also 
seen how the organized movement to effect this 
purpose was gradually relaxed, and its avowed 
objects more and more discredited, until, after a 
long struggle, the so-called ecclesiastical statutes 
of some of the New-England States were re- 
pealed within the present century. Nevertheless, 
the spirit of it survives, and still carries on a rest- 
less propagandism ; the object being, on the part 



in.] To Civil Society. in 

of various religious bodies, to secure control of 
the State as such, and to use political instrumen- 
talities on the one hand to secure religious ends, 
while religious instrumentalities, on the other, are 
pledged and employed to gain or to serve political 
ends. I need not specify instances in which this 
has been attempted, and is still attempted. I 
need not name religious bodies, which, oy their 
corporate action, have undertaken to influence 
legislation or to win elections. It is notorious 
that such things have been done ; so that there 
have been eras in our history when it seemed that 
the practical politics of the land have been dic- 
tated by ecclesiastical conferences, and when poli- 
ticians were obnoxious to the charge of shaping 
their utterances and their actions to meet the 
views and secure the support of large and influen- 
tial religious denominations which had undertaken 
such dictatorship. Of such interference on the 
part of religious bodies, it is not too much to say, 
that it tends to the utter subversion of both civil 
and religious liberty. Not only is it a violation 
of the only relation which Christ intended should 
subsist, as we have seen, between Christianity and 
civil society, but its inevitable effect must be to 



112 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

eventually abrogate the true authority of both. 
By thrusting religion into politics, the true idea 
of the Church is impaired. By substituting reli- 
gious or ecclesiastical for civil reasons of State, 
the true doctrine of popular sovereignty in politi- 
cal government is overthrown, and the principle 
of despotism in politics is practically inaugurated. 
The final result must be, the degradation of reli- 
gion and the depravation of politics, the destruc- 
tion of the true character of the Church on the 
one hand, and of the State on the other. Against 
this danger it behooves the Christian citizen of 
the Republic to watch with jealous care. Already 
it has worked much evil, and it portends even 
greater evil in the future. The proper spheres of 
Church and State are distinct. The only safety 

i 

for either lies in the maintenance of their entire, 
independence and separateness each from the 
other. The moment either invades the province 
of the other, it becomes a wrongdoer, no matter 
what the alleged motive may be. In a word, the 
true function of Christian statesmanship is the 
maintenance of the relation instituted by Christ 
between Christianity and civil society. 

The second movement hostile to civil and reli- 



III.] To Civil Society. 113 

gious liberty may be even more briefly referred 
to, for the reason that it is organized, tangible, 
historic, and is therefore better known. It may 
be designated as Ultramontanism or Vaticanism 
in politics and religion. It is in no spirit of the 
mere alarmist that I point out the enormous dan- 
gers which threaten us from this source. No ex- 
amination of the relation between Christianity 
and civil society can escape the portentous fact, 
that, in this land, a vast multitude of our fellow- 
citizens are committed by their creed to a denial 
of the fundamental principles upon which our 
government is founded, and are pledged by the 
irreformable teachings, and, indeed, mandates, of 
their religion, to regard as the ideal State, a State 
that has been made practically subject to a for- 
eign and irresponsible ecclesiastical power. It is 
but fair to admit that this was not always so. 
Though the Roman Catholics of the colonies can- 
not be said to have played any part, as such, in 
the achievement and settlement of our civil and 
religious liberty ; yet their loyalty to the cause of 
the country could not be doubted : and there were 
no more devoted patriots than some of the wise, 
good, and great men among their number. It has 



114 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

been well pointed out, that the establishment of 
religious toleration in Maryland, while " it was a 
wise measure, for which the two Lords Baltimore, 
father and son, deserve the highest honor," yet 
" the measure was really defensive ; and its main 
and very legitimate purpose plainly was, to secure 
the free exercise of the Roman-Catholic reli- 
gion." r It is also evident, that the enactment of 
toleration was not the work of Roman Catholics 
in Maryland ; since toleration was provided for in 
the charter which the English king granted them, 
and the colonial Act of Toleration was passed by 
a legislative body, of which two-thirds were Prot- 
estants. 2 It is, however, undoubtedly true, we 
think, that the spirit which for a long time ani- 
mated the Roman Catholics of this country was 
not antagonistic to our institutions. Though, 
beyond all question, the attitude of the Papacy, 
especially since the publication by Boniface VIII. 
of his famous bull, Unam Sanctam, had been hos- 
tile to popular liberty and the independence of 
the civil power ; yet in this country the circum- 

1 Gladstone: Vaticanism. 

2 Gladstone : Rome and the Newest Fashions in Religion. Preface, 
pp. viii, ix. Also Maryland Not a Roman Catholic Colony, by E. D. N., 
p. 7. 



in.] To Civil Society. 115 

stances favorable to freedom had been sufficiently 
influential to keep our Roman-Catholic population 
virtually true to their civic allegiance. But since 
the Vatican Council, and the promulgation of the 
Vatican decrees, all this is changed. Since the 
decree of infallibility, a theory of civil society 
absolutely inconsistent with the principles upon 
which our institutions are founded has been im- 
posed by irreformable authority upon all who 
belong to the Roman obedience ; and an authori- 
tative declaration of ecclesiastical and civil rights 
and duties, and of the relation between them, has 
been made, which is in conflict with the princi- 
ples and policy of our government. To the reply, 
that there is a sense in which the Canon Law 
may be interpreted which is not inconsistent with 
the duties of American citizenship, it is enough 
to answer, that, even if this were so, the power to 
interpret all canons, and to define all human duty, 
is now declared, as an article of faith, to be lodged 
in an infallible, irresponsible, and foreign poten- 
tate, who may, if he so please, promulgate to-mor- 
row, as his predecessors have done again and 
again in time past, such definitions as will set all 
who accept them at open variance with civil soci- 



n6 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

ety. To this it is no answer to say that he 
will not do so ; that he will be restrained by any 
considerations of truth, of justice, or by any influ- 
ence of a spiritual and supernatural character. 
The very recognition of his right, of his power, to 
do this, at once destroys undivided allegiance to 
the State, and transfers the true and ultimate 
authority upon which society rests to the Roman 
curia. This is the only tenable theory of Vati- 
canism ; and, however vociferously it may be 
disavowed, it is the theory upon which the Roman- 
Catholic hierarchy in this country are obviously 
acting. 1 Bishops receiving mission and jurisdic- 
tion immediately from Rome, and responsible 
directly to Rome and to Rome only, assisted by a 
clergy completely subject to them and to the 
Pope, many of whom are aliens by birth and edu- 
cation, and all of whom are separated by the dis- 
cipline of order and the celibacy of their lives 
from the domestic life of the people, — these con- 
stitute the agencies by which Rome is able to 
carry on any kind of propagandism in this country. 
When we add to this consideration the further 

1 For one of the latest evidences of this, see the Pastoral Letter, 
published at the Fourth Provincial Council of Cincinnati, March 19, 1882. 



III.] To Civil Society. 117 

fact, that the spiritual control which Romanism as 
a system exerts over the consciences, the words, 
the thoughts, the actions, of its adherents is inde- 
feasible and complete, and that it is through this 
control that the Roman pontiff now claims the 
power to enforce his definitions of all kinds of 
human duty, it is seen what a tremendous engine 
of power is here provided, and how portentous of 
evil it would be to our free country unless its 
influence should be neutralized. That it will be 
neutralized I do not doubt. But it must be by 
the most zealous care to diffuse intelligence ; to 
build up true religion, especially in the homes 
of the land ; and to promote the promulgation of 
right views of the relation between Christianity 
and civil society. 

Finally, there is a re-actionary movement, pro- 
voked in great degree by the tendencies already 
noted, which, for want of a better term, may be 
called secularism. Unlike English secularism, it 
is not disposed to enter the arena of theological 
debate ; though some of its advocates are not un- 
willing to masquerade on the lecture-platform as 
theologasters for gain. It is for the most part a 
quiet, unavowed purpose on the part of politicians, 



1 1 8 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

both active and theoretical, who are either irreli- 
gious, or indifferent to all religion, to discredit the 
Christian Church, to limit, by unfriendly legisla- 
tion, its activities and agencies, and finally dismiss 
it with contempt, or reduce it to entire subjection 
to the civil power. The theory on which it pro- 
ceeds is, that the Church is to be tolerated only 
because it serves, or if it serves social and political 
order. It is not denied, that it may be useful to 
amuse the ignorant and restrain the vicious ; but 
it is insisted, that, in doing this, it only wins a 
right to be tolerated by the State as useful to it, 
unless, indeed, it can be made a mere department 
of the State, to " evolve its ethics ; " in which case 
it is gravely proposed to take it into the pay of 
the State, to subsidize it, and control it altogether. 
It is pointed out, that religion under our present 
voluntary system is altogether too expensive. 
The State could maintain a clergy of its own at 
half the cost. It is estimated, that, in this coun- 
try, religion costs the people one dollar and ten 
cents per capita per annum ; whereas in France, 
where the clergy are supported by the State, cleri- 
cal salaries are very much smaller, and the tax 
on the people very much less. This and other 



in.] To Civil Society. 119 

reasons combine to strengthen the movement to 
which reference is made. 1 No doubt, there is as 
yet a lack of unity and organization among its 
adherents : but they are all animated by a growing 
hostility to the Church, and to the clergy as a 
class ; and they do not lack opportunities to make 
their power felt. The character of the danger 
from this source cannot be overstated. It is the 
most remorseless, the most unsparing, the most 
cruel, political movement that has been instituted 
in modern times. If it should succeed, it could 
not crush out Christianity, of course ; but it would 
convert the State into a despotism the most intol- 
erable. The extent of the danger is easily under- 
estimated. Unless I greatly mistake the signs of 
the times, it will soon appear to be one of the 
gravest perils of our national political life. Never- 
theless, the remedy is easily discernible. The evils 
against \vhich it is re-actionary must be avoided. 2 
The pretensions of Puritanism and Vaticanism in 

1 See A Critical Review of American Politics, by Charles Reemelin, 
p. 326 et seq. 

2 The reader is referred, for an illustration of the dangers and evils 
here pointed out, to a recent debate in the French Chambers between the 
Bishop of Angers and M. Roche, reported in The Guardian newspaper of 
Nov. 15, 1882. 



120 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. hi.] 

politics must be discredited and overthrown. 
The political preacher and the political priest 
should be relegated by public opinion to their 
proper duties. The same public opinion should 
be taught to utterly discredit and frown down all 
interference with religious liberty and the rights 
of conscience on the hustings and in the legisla- 
ture. If it be asked, Who shall undertake to do 
this for religion and the State ? may I not answer, 
Churchmen will undertake to do their part towards 
it ? Churchmen occupy the vantage-ground, and 
a large responsibility rests upon them in this as 
in all things. For, if -we have reached right con- 
clusions in the matter, whatever limitations other 
religious bodies labor under, American Church- 
men are free to hold true views of the relations 
between Christianity and civil society. 



LECTURE IV. 

EDUCATION. 



LECTURE IV. 

EDUCATION. 

"And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given 
unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, 
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy 
Ghost : teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded 
you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." — 
St. Matthew xxviii. 18-20. 

\ T 7HEN we consider how completely our Lord 
* * committed his work to his apostles, leaving 
them to carry out in history and time his mag- 
nificent and far-reaching purposes, we reason- 
ably expect to find, among his parting injunctions 
to them, some indication of the relation which 
his Church was intended to sustain to the various 
conditions by which it was to be surrounded. 
We are prepared, therefore, to see, in what has 
been well called the great commission, the out- 
line, at least, of a general plan that was to guide 
the Church's activity in all ages and lands. It is 
evident, indeed, upon a little reflection, that very 

much more than a bare outline is here suggested. 

123 



124 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

It is quite certain, that, however brief and practi- 
cal the apostolical commission was as a missionary 
mandate and working-charter, it was pregnant 
with a wealth of meaning that could be fully dis- 
closed to human thought, only in the developments 
of history. We may well believe that the "infi- 
nite abundance " of that meaning has not yet been 
fully revealed ; but enough has been already made 
known to exemplify how clearly and completely 
all the questions which have emerged along the 
line of the Church's work were present in the 
beginning to the thought of the Church's Founder. 
It was as the King and Sovereign Ruler of all 
things that he spoke, investing his agents and 
apostles with complete and plenary authority ; 
but it was also as the great statesman of human- 
kind, as one who took note of the conditions that 
were before him, and who knew how to adjust 
his agencies to the work which they were to per- 
form, and to the circumstances by which they 
were to be surrounded. Regarding the apostolic 
commission, then, as the charter of the Church's 
work, we find a suggestion of the various employ- 
ments of which that work was to be composed ; 
and among these it is here indicated that the 



IV.] To Civil Society. 125 

Church was intended to discharge an educational 
or pedagogic function towards the nations, and to 
enter into a relation the most intimate and influ- 
ential with civil society. 

There is a characteristic connection between 
our Lord's assumption of universal power, and 
the missionary and pedagogic mandate which he 
based upon it. He still maintained his renuncia- 
tion of a kingdom of force. He persisted in his 
high resolve, that his kingdom should not be of 
this world, even while he proclaimed that all 
power, both in heaven and earth, had been given 
to him. In the fulness of that power he sent his 
apostles forth, not to reign, nor to fight ; not to 
oppose force to force ; not to subjugate or destroy ; 
but to disciple, to teach, to win men, and trans- 
form them by nurture and grace. It seemed a 
strange non sequitur to the philosophic and civic 
thought of that age, and men have hardly yet 
learned clearly to discern the force of the divine 
logic upon which the "therefore" of the great 
commission is founded. It was because all power, 
both in heaven and in earth, had been given to 
him : it was because he spoke, not merely as man, 
but as God, that he persisted in the day of his 



126 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

exaltation, as in the time of his humiliation, in the 
divine method of winning men, discarding and 
discrediting authority and force as of no real 
value in the kingdom of souls. Certainly, never 
man spake like this man. For man, in the day of 
his power, has thought it royal to exercise domin- 
ion and enforce authority : but Jesus said, All 
power is mine ; therefore go ye and disciple the 
nations, baptizing them ; go teach them : and this 
my work and purpose I will also participate in 
as I lead and direct you ; for I will be with you 
alway, even unto the end of the world. 

The terms of the apostolic commission indicate 
that the Christian Church has a mission to the 
nations of the earth. At the same time, it is 
clearly implied that the Church was not intended 
to operate directly upon the nations as such, nor 
to enter into alliance with them, or lord it over 
them. For, when we come to inquire how the 
apostles were to disciple the nations, we find that 
it was to be done through the nurture, the disci- 
pline, the teaching, which, in the nature of the 
case, could be applied only to the individuals of 
which nations are composed. Christian disciple- 
ship cannot be other than personal. It is only as 



IV.] To Civil Society. 127 

a free and self-determining personality that a man 
can become a disciple of the Lord Jesus. We 
have seen, that it was one of the distinguishing 
characteristics of the plan of Christ that he rec- 
ognized and appealed to the individuality of man. 
This characteristic was not obscured in the terms 
of the apostolic commission. One by one the 
souls were to be baptized. One by one they were 
to be taught to observe the things which he com- 
manded, and in this way the nation was to be 
discipled. For man, as we have seen, is a social, 
or, as Aristotle terms him, a "political," being. 
He is endowed with a strong impulse to associate 
with his fellows for the attainment of certain defi- 
nite political objects. The association which ac- 
tually results from the operation of this common 
impulse constitutes the nation, the State. The 
way, then, to reach the nation, according to the 
terms of the apostolical commission, is through 
the constituent elements out of which it is organ- 
ized, and along the lines of its organization. Dis- 
ciple the men, the souls, baptizing them. Teach 
them to observe the things which Christ com- 
manded. In this way the nations shall be disci- 
pled, and made the kingdoms of God and of his 



128 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

Christ. It is most interesting to note, that the 
very terms of the apostolic commission are incon- 
sistent with any other theory of civil society than 
that which is here adopted. If the State were 
organized from above, and not from beneath, then 
the Church's operations would have been directed 
primarily to the nation at such, or at least to the 
rulers thereof. It would have been sufficient to 
disciple the king, or the head of the people, first, 
leaving the rest to follow as the result of govern- 
mental influence and authority. In point of fact, 
this method has been attempted, in more than one 
instance of missionary enterprise, as the natural 
result of a false theory of civil society. More 
than one despotic ruler has committed the blun- 
der of attempting to impose Christianity upon his 
people by royal mandate, or by the influence of 
the royal example ; but, in every such instance, a 
speedy apostasy has demonstrated the falsity of 
the method and of the civic theory upon which 
it was founded. The apostolic commission, how- 
ever, points out a more excellent way. Disciple 
the nations, it says in effect, by the Christian 
nurture and Christian teaching of individual souls. 
Direct your efforts to the source of civic authority 



iv.] To Civil Society. 129 

and power. Translate the souls of men into the 
kingdom of God. Make the men who compose 
society to be more and more what Christ would 
have them to be. Stand beside the fountains of 
national life, and keep them pure. In this way 
fashion the characters of men, create public opin- 
io^ transform and transfigure the ideals by which 
men are chiefly led. Nay, transform and trans- 
figure men themselves, so that their social and 
political instincts and impulses may take the right 
direction, and pursue the right course. In this 
way the nations shall be discipled, and brought to 
acknowledge him to whom all power has been 
given in heaven and in earth. 

It is evident, then, that the influence exerted 
by Christianity upon civil society would be inti- 
mate and profound in precise proportion to the 
completeness with which the Christian Church 
performs the duty which is here indicated. And 
in a country like ours, whose government derives 
its authority, not only in abstract theory, but in 
actual fact, from the popular will, the obvious 
method of attempting to shape the character 
of society, and to disciple the nation, is to apply 
Christian influence to the very source of the 



130 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

nation's power and authority ; that is, to the wills 
and consciences of the people themselves. It 
becomes, therefore, a matter of the greatest prac- 
tical importance, to inquire how Christian influ- 
ence may best be exerted in the nurture, the 
training, the education, of a people. In a word, 
we are brought, in the course of our inquiry, to 
one of the most important practical questions of 
the day, which is, What is the relation of Chris- 
tianity to civil society in the matter of education ? 
If we use the word education in its broadest 
sense, it indicates the most comprehensive and 
the most precious of all human interests. Every 
human being has an indefeasible right to be edu- 
cated ; that is, to have his faculties developed, to 
be put in possession of his powers, and to have 
the use of himself at his best. And, in order that 
this right might be realized by each soul, God 
himself has instituted a sacred economy, which 
he founded upon the most profound and cogent 
instincts of humanity, — which is the economy of 
the family. For this he instituted marriage in 
the very beginning of human history. Nay, 
in the very act of creation, and in delivering to 
man his viceregal sovereignty over the world, God 



iv.] To Civil Society. 131 

instituted marriage, and sanctified it as the means 
by which man was at once to realize and perpetu- 
ate his dominion. For this cause he created man 
male and female, and " blessed them, and said 
unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish 
the earth, and subdue it." For this cause he 
ordained the inviolability and indissolubility of 
marriage; decreeing that a man shall "leave his 
father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his 
wife : and they shall be one flesh." Undoubtedly, 
marriage is a divine mystery, whose ultimate basis 
lies among the secret things that belong to the 
Lord our God. But it is also a vocation. " When 
God created mankind male and female, he thereby 
announced, and, as it were, impressed upon our 
nature, the fact that it was his will that we should 
marry. Hence we are justified in saying that 
marriage is a duty, and the most universal duty 
incumbent on us." " And, among the obligations 
which impose the duty of marriage on mankind, 
none is more cogent than this, that in this way 
God has intended to provide, not only for the per- 
petuity, but for the education, of the race. The 
most lofty and dignified use of the family is the 

1 Luthardt : Moral Truths of Christianity, p. 1 14. 



132 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

fit nurture and education of the children given 
to wedded love, and the great and sacred respon- 
sibility of educating such children rests primarily 
and by divine enactment upon the parents. It is 
the design of our heavenly Father, that every 
child born into the world should spend its nascent 
years in the calm peace of a holy home, protected, 
nourished, and prepared for the duties and respon- 
sibilities of life, by parental care. When this 
is borne in mind, we realize how precious the 
sanctity of the home-life is, and how inviolable 
those safeguards ought to be by which Providence 
has surrounded it. We realize why it is that God 
has decreed that marriage, once consummated, 
should be indissoluble except by death. For 
marriage was designed, in the divine economy, 
not merely, nor even chiefly, for the ease or com- 
fort of the wedded pair, but for the maintenance 
and education of their children. The home is the 
sanctuary appointed by God, within whose sacred- 
ness immortal souls appear as visitants from the 
skies, and within whose order and peace such 
souls are to be nurtured and trained for a useful 
passage through time, and a worthy return to 
immortality. He, therefore, who invades its sane- 



iv.] To Civil Society. 133 

tity, or disturbs its peace, is not only a trans- 
gressor of the divine law, but is also guilty of 
the greatest conceivable crime against society at 
its very source. How monstrous, then, are the 
laws which legalize confusion and disorder in the 
family, by loosening the bonds of matrimony, and 
permitting the wayward passions of men to break 
up an economy which God intended should be 
indissoluble ! 

The family, then, is the divinely appointed 
institution for the education of the human race ; 
and the duty of educating every child rests prima- 
rily upon its parents. This obligation preceded 
the establishment of civil society, and was in full 
force long before Christianity began its work 
among men. It is important for us to remember, 
that education has been intrusted by divine ap- 
pointment, neither to the Church nor to the State, 
but to the family, — to an institution with which 
the State cannot rightly interfere, and which the 
Church must sanctify and protect. Hence the 
right of every child to an adequate education is 
not distinctively either a political or a Christian 
right, however intimately both Christianity and 
civil society may be related to it : and, conversely, 



134 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

the duty of affording an education to every child 
is not distinctively a political or a Christian duty ; 
since the duty was imposed, and the means for it 
provided, antecedent to the formation of society 
and the institution of Christianity. It is impor- 
tant for us to remember, then, at the outset, that 
neither the State nor the Church has an original 
function in the work of education proper, but 
that, in so far as they have relation to it, they 
must both enter into such relation through the 
family. 

The relations sustained by the State and by the 
Church to education, however, are essentially 
different, as we shall see, — so different that it is 
quite impossible to co-ordinate them. Whatsoever 
responsibility and whatsoever authority the State 
has in the matter of education are wholly dele- 
gated, and are limited by the terms of the com- 
pact or arrangement by which such delegation 
is effected. Christianity, on the other hand, ap- 
proaches education, as it does all human interests, 
from above, and with a mission, not to usurp 
its function, or set it aside, but to inform, to 
spiritualize, to complete it. Christianity is related 
to education as an influence from another world 



iv.] To Civil Society. 135 

directed to the whole domain of human well-be- 
ing ; while the State is related to education, only in 
so far as education may be intrusted to its super- 
vision and control. And it should not be forgot- 
ten, that such supervision and control can be made 
to extend to only a small part of education. For 
more is learned by the child at home than at 
school : the most important part, not only of the 
knowledge acquired by him, but of the develop- 
ment of his faculties, the appropriation of his 
powers, takes place under the manifold influences 
of parental authority, parental example, parental 
affection, and in the atmosphere of the home. 1 
Nevertheless, there is a department of mental cul- 
ture and discipline, the supervision and direction 
of which can be wisely delegated to- others. In 
other words, teachers may be wisely employed, 
whose attainments and special training enable 
them to secure the best results in such culture 
and discipline ; the teachers so employed being 
merely the agents of the parents, and deriving 
their authority from them. In order to secure 
the most efficient teachers, it is in the natural 
course of things for several families to combine ; 

1 Compare Luthardt, Moral Truths of Christianity, p. 144 et seq. 



136 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

in which case it is quite evident that the teacher, 
as the agent of all such families, would have 
authority only in those matters which all united 
in intrusting to him. The case is not at all 
altered, when, by civil compact or enactment, the 
citizens of a commonwealth delegate to the State 
the duty of sustaining and directing some part of 
their educational work. . In this case the State 
is simply the agent of the families composing 
it, and has no direct authority and no immediate 
responsibility beyond what is thus delegated. It 
is true, that in a representative commonwealth 
like one of ours, in which popular suffrage is the 
appointed means of delegating public authority, 
it is not the family as such, but the citizen at 
the polls, who creates and controls the agencies 
of public education. Nevertheless, the citizen, 
in this case especially, and in every case in some 
sort, is the representative of the family and home; 
each citizen being in the natural order the head 
of a family. The duty, the responsibility, the 
authority, of the State, then, in public education, 
are not original, but derived, and are limited 
strictly to those things which by agreement have 
been delegated to public control. 



iv.] To Civil Society. 137 

In saying this, it is not denied that education is 
a matter of public concern. On the contrary, it is 
insisted that it is a matter of paramount public 
concern that the people of a free State should all 
be educated. Nevertheless, it is also insisted that 
the obligation to this rests primarily, not on the 
State as such, but on those who make and control 
the State ; namely, on the citizens in their domes- 
tic relations, who compose the body politic. Be- 
cause man is a social and political being, he is 
under obligation, not only to organize civil society, 
but to make it as efficient as possible ; and, in 
order to this, he is under obligation to promote 
the virtue and intelligence of those upon whose 
intelligence and virtue the well-being of the State 
must depend. There are, therefore, manifold con- 
siderations which require the citizen, and the State 
through him, to promote the diffusion of knowl- 
edge, the increase of virtue, the development of 
intelligence, among the people. In doing this, 
however, the citizen must be content to employ 
the State, only in such a way as may be consist- 
ent with the economy of civil society. In educa- 
tional as in other matters, the State ought not to 
exceed or to abuse its delegated powers. We have 



138 TJie Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

seen that all its "just powers are derived from 
the consent of the governed," and that it has no 
divine right or inherent authority to transgress or 
transcend this limitation. Much less may it do 
so in this matter, which was primarily committed 
to another institution ; namely, the family. 

The question as to whether our public schools 
have any duty or authority in regard to religious 
culture or instruction, is, first of all, a question of 
fact. And, as a matter of fact, it is not to be 
denied, I suppose, that no such duty or authority 
could be delegated to the State in the present 
divided condition of religious opinion among our 
people. To the further question, whether such 
duty and authority ought to be so delegated, it 
seems to me that a negative answer must be re- 
turned. To teach religion, or to promote reli- 
gious culture, does not fall within the province of 
civil society. To discharge these functions the 
Church of Christ was instituted, and the Church 
can neither lay down its work nor delegate its 
responsibility. It was to the Church, and not to 
the State, that Christ said, Go teach men to 
observe the things which I have commanded; and, 
as Churchmen, we are not at liberty, as it seems 



iv.] To Civil Society. 139 

to me, to intrust the State, or the public schools 
under the State, with any authority in the matter 
of religious instruction. Not only would the dele- 
gation of such authority be impracticable, but it 
would be altogether unwise and undesirable. 
Christian statesmanship, especially in this land, 
should not be slow to see that such a procedure 
would be based on a principle altogether at vari- 
ance with the philosophy of civil society, and 
which, if accepted, and carried out to its logi- 
cal conclusion, would speedily overthrow public 
liberty. For, if the State can be invested with 
authority to teach religion in the schools, it must 
be empowered to determine what religion it will 
teach. If it can be invested with the authority to 
shape religious convictions, it may also have the 
power to impose all opinions. To say nothing of 
the transfer of the Church's function to the State, 
and the virtual abrogation of the Church, in either 
case there would be a complete obliteration of the 
rights of conscience, a complete destruction of 
personal liberty, and the erection of a tyranny as 
complete as has yet been accomplished in history. 
It is important to remember, that the committal 
of educational interests to State control is simply 



140 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

a conventional expedient. It is done because it 
seems best to the body politic, on the whole, that 
it should be done. The advantages of it are un- 
deniable, but there are also serious disadvantages. 
Among the disadvantages is the unavoidable ex- 
clusion of Christian worship and corresponding 
direct religious influences from the public school. 
Certainly, no Christian man can be entirely con- 
tent with any system of education in which Chris- 
tian worship is not possible. Beyond all doubt, 
the ideal school is the school which shall be 
entirely open on all sides to a genuine Christian 
influence, to which Christianity is related as a 
pervading spirit, affecting the children through 
worship, through discipline, through the exam- 
ple, the character, the unconscious grace, of the 
teacher. The ideal common school, in other 
words, is the Christian school, — the school that is 
Christian, not by virtue of its dogmatic teaching, 
nor by virtue of any special ecclesiastical control, 
but by virtue of its being pervaded, through wor- 
ship and discipline, in tone and character, by a 
genuine Christian spirit. Now, it is undeniable 
that these advantages cannot be secured by civil 
enactment ; and they cannot be secured by State 



IV.] To Civil Society. 141 

control. And it is certainly most gratifying in 
every way, that there should be so strong a move- 
ment on foot, especially among Churchmen, to 
establish and maintain, wherever it is practicable, 
parochial and other religious schools. With such 
schools, however, our present inquiry has nothing 
to do. We are now concerned to inquire how 
Christianity is related to civil society in regard to 
the common and necessarily secular schools of the 
country. 

The question remains, then, Is it safe, is it 
right, to intrust the education of our children un- 
der any circumstances to schools which must of 
necessity refrain from religious teaching? To this 
I believe an affirmative answer may be returned, 
provided the legitimate influence of Christianity 
be otherwise brought to bear upon education. To 
the question whether this is possible under a sys- 
tem of public education that is purely secular, I 
answer, that I believe it to be entirely possible, 
provided the Christian Church will recognize its 
real responsibility, and do its whole duty. It is 
not a question whether Christian influence shall 
be withdrawn or banished from the nurture of the 
young. The question is, whether the young can 



142 The Relation of Chris lia?iity [Lect. 

be adequately nurtured and instructed in religion 
unless the school in which they spend a few hours 
each day be enlisted in that particular service. 
Surely it is not necessary that the family and 
the Church should delegate their religious duty, 
or abdicate their spiritual responsibility, to the 
school ; and, in case this is not done, it surely is 
possible that Christianity may still reach and in- 
fluence the education of the child through the 
agencies of Christian nurture and the ordinances 
of religion in the Church and in the home. 

I am aware that the question here proposed is a 
large, and in many respects a difficult, one. I 
cannot hope to consider all the issues, both of fact 
and of opinion, that have arisen along the course 
of this vexed controversy. All I can hope to do 
is, to indicate the principles that may lead, as I 
trust, to its solution. Perhaps we shall gain a 
more definite idea of the real issues involved if 
we recur for a moment to a proposition that has 
been already advanced. We have seen that the 
obligation to educate the young is older than 
Christianity ; that Christianity did not create this 
obligation, but found it in full force, — a divinely 
appointed institution, namely, the family, having 



IV.] To Civil Society. 143 

been established to discharge it. To educate the 
human race in this sense was not one of the char- 
acteristic duties of the Christian Church ; though 
beyond all question it was to be the Church's 
mission to re-enforce, encourage, and exalt the 
agencies that had already been provided for that 
purpose. It is to be noted, moreover, that of the 
two different terms that are translated "teach," 
"teaching," in our version, the first means more 
properly to "disciple," to bring to discipleship, 
to make disciples of ; and this, as we have seen, 
has reference to the nation through the Christian 
nurture of the individuals of which it is composed. 
The second term, which means teach or instruct 
in what might be termed the didactic sense of the 
word, is limited in its application to those things 
which Christ had taught to the apostles, — "teach- 
ing them to observe all things whatsoever I have 
commanded you." Bearing this fact in mind, 
then, we are quite prepared to find that there are 
departments of education which lie quite outside 
of the special province of Christianity, and that it 
may be possible for Christianity to be related to 
such departments without usurpation and without 
antagonism. In saying this, I do not mean to 



144 The Relation of Christianity [Lev,t. 

deny that Christianity must take a deep concern 
in this as in all human interests ; but I wish to 
point out, that there is a large part of what we 
call education, especially in the common schools of 
the land, that the Christian Church is under no 
necessary obligation to demand the control of. I 
suppose it is actually the case, that most teachers, 
even the most devout, in our common schools, 
have little real occasion to introduce Christian 
instruction into the classroom. If the facts were 
known, it would probably be found, that, in the 
proper work of the school, there is hardly any 
Christian instruction possible, and that what is 
given could be better and more effectively given, 
by the pastor and the parents, in the Church and 
in the home. It should not be forgotten, that 
Christianity is not a philosophy. It has no pecul- 
iar system of thought, or summary of knowledge. 
It does not really profess to teach a peculiar 
astronomy or geology,, or cosmogony or ontology, 
however mistakenly or persistently such a claim 
has been made for it. Nay, it is now well seen, 
that however valuable dogmas and creeds are and 
shall be, yet Christianity is not merely a set of 
dogmas, or creed of opinions, but is a faith, a life. 



iv.] To Civil Society. 145 

It does its best work, not by dogmatic teaching, 
not by propounding theories of astronomy or 
geology or cosmogony or ontology, but by touch- 
ing the heart, arousing the conscience, awakening 
the spirit to the unseen realities above it and 
the immortal dignities before it ; by giving to the 
disciple love to be the moral motive-power of his 
life, and by training him to walk with his unseen 
Guide and King. And this it does, not neces- 
sarily by invading the schoolroom, and inaugurat- 
ing a special propagandism there, but rather by 
shedding its radiance over the life of the child, by 
sanctifying his sabbaths, by the sweet and gentle 
ministries of the domestic fireside and the family 
circle, by the simple and loving methods of Chris- 
tian nurture in the Church, the Sunday school, the 
home. To be a Christian does not depend upon 
the amount or the kind of philosophic or scientific 
knowledge we acquire, nor upon the intellectual 
training and discipline which we undergo ; but it 
depends on the power of our faith, the complete- 
ness of our trust, the entireness of our self-surren- 
der to the guidance of Christ and his Holy Spirit. 
Let the home-training of the child, then, be all that 
it should be : let his religious discipline be care- 



146 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

fully looked after, according to the Church's plan, 
by parents- and sponsors and pastor, and the 
question of religious teaching in the school will 
become comparatively unimportant. The real 
trouble is, the neglect of religious education out of 
the school, rather than within it. It is the God- 
less home, and the indifferent or formal or unspir- 
itual Church, rather than the secular school, that 
are dwarfing the religious life of this generation. 

A candid examination of the history of educa- 
tion, if it were possible within the limits of this 
inquiry, would go far to explain existing educa- 
tional questions, and to suggest their solution. 
It may suffice to point out, that, while for many 
centuries the direction of education in Europe was 
almost exclusively in the hands of the Christian 
clergy, the tendency in modern times has been 
towards the emancipation of education from eccle- 
siastical control. In the Church's earliest and 
best days, the clergy confined themselves to their 
spiritual functions. For more than two hundred 
years we have no account of an attempt on their 
part to control educational work. Their attitude 
was rather one of helpfulness towards existing 
institutions of learning, and of a purpose to sup- 



iv.] To Civil Society. 147 

plement their work and to evangelize their influ- 
ence through the Christian nurture of the home 
and the Church. The time came, however, when 
the ecclesiastics, especially in the West, began to 
discredit secular learning as dangerous as well as 
idle and profane ; and, with the irruption of the 
barbarians, education fell altogether into their 
hands. A careful study of their conduct of it 
will disclose the fact, I fear, that their influence 
was not always favorable to the best results. Un- 
doubtedly, we should not be unmindful of the 
large debt of gratitude which the world owes to 
the religious establishments of the dark ages, and 
especially to a few great monasteries, for keeping 
alive the torch of learning ; but it may be doubted 
whether, on the whole, the influence of ecclesias- 
ticism upon education was not disastrous. There 
are few more painful annals than the accounts 
which have come down to us of the narrow bigotry 
and even cruelty of the monkish elementary 
schools, within which children were taught little 
except a multiplicity of superstitious observances, 
and learned little except servility of spirit. Under 
such influences it speedily came to pass, that none 
but monks and ecclesiastics attained to learned 



148 The Relatioji of Christianity [Lect. 

culture at all: the young squires and cadets of 
energy and promise betaking themselves rather 
to the castle than to the monastery, to be trained 
in the presence of gentle ladies and in the ranks 
of feudal chieftains to deeds of knightliness and 
feats of arms ; while the children of the peasantry 
and tradesmen grew up in ignorance, content to 
know no more than to be able to mumble a prayer 
which they did not understand, or to keep a tally 
of their daily gains. So it came to pass, that it 
was unusual for a gentleman to know how to write 
his name, and this at the time when the wealth 
and influence of the clergy were greatest, and 
when they had the education of the people exclu- 
sively in their hands. It is perfectly true, that 
there were eras of progress and improvement, and 
that the influence of Christianity was then as now 
altogether favorable to the promotion of human 
learning. Even mistaken and bigoted monkish 
methods could not entirely retard the advance- 
ment of Christian civilization. Spite of all the 
blunders of her children, the Church showed her- 
self even then to be the foster-mother of learning ; 
and, under her inspiration, pious founders built 
and endowed noble universities in different parts 



iv.] To Civil Society. 149 

of Europe. Nevertheless, it can hardly be denied 
that elementary education, at least, has been im- 
peded, rather than set forward, by the mastery of 
ecclesiasticism in the schoolroom. At the Refor- 
mation a more notable era of progress than any 
that had preceded it was begun. In England 
the clergy, with that wise practical instinct that 
has generally distinguished them, reformed educa- 
tional methods in such a way as to keep it largely 
under their control ; yet it cannot be denied, that 
even there the emancipation of education from 
ecclesiastical management has gone steadily for- 
ward. 1 In Germany emancipation has been 
pushed to still greater extremes, and under cir- 
cumstances less favorable to Christianity ; while 
in France ultramontane ecclesiasticism seems to 
have lost its hold on the control of education alto- 
gether. Without taking into consideration the 
notorious ignorance and degradation of the masses 
in the Roman-Catholic countries of Southern 
Europe, where the schools are still in the hands of 
the Church, it is evident that the exclusive eccle- 
siastical control of public education has been dis- 

1 See a thoughtful article in the Guardian newspaper of Sept. 13, 1882, 
entitled The Church and the Universities. 



150 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

credited rather than justified by results. The 
verdict of history has been against it. The bold 
and heroic attempt of the Society of Jesus to re- 
gain the lost prestige of ecclesiastical direction 
and government in education has failed in every 
land ; and history is helping us to understand, that 
however admirable a schoolmaster may now and 
then be found in the ranks of the clergy, yet it 
is not a clerical function to teach school, but 
rather to disciple, to baptize, to teach men to 
observe the things which Christ commanded. 

One disastrous result of the long ecclesiastical 
domination above referred to yet remains. The 
monkish teachers of the Middle Ages taught 
parents to resign the religious education of their 
children altogether into their hands. In this way, 
as in numberless ways, the dignity of parental 
influence and authority was lowered ; and parents 
were encouraged to think that the moral and reli- 
gious training of their children was a matter of 
the schoolroom altogether, and not of the Church 
and of the family. This opinion still prevails. 
Christian children are often untaught at home. 
Family religion is often neglected. Parents have 
not yet returned to their own responsibilities. 



iv.] To Civil Society. 151 

The domestic duties of the pastor are often al- 
most wholly undischarged and unknown. This, 
now, is the dilemma which history has presented 
to us. Monkish influence first secularized the 
family or home. Educational progress has now 
secularized the public school. What is the 
remedy ? I venture to say, that only one remedy 
is possible. We must revive domestic religion. 
We must reconsecrate the family to its high and 
holy office. We must bring the influence of the 
Church's system of Christian nurture to bear 
upon the lives of our children. We must bring 
the influence of Christianity to bear upon secular 
education in the public schools through the 
Church and the home. 

Practically this is a matter of immense impor- 
tance. The time has fully come when we must 
decide what our attitude shall be towards public 
education. In all the States of this vast country 
there is to-day a complete system of public 
schools. No doubt, few of such schools are alto- 
gether, or even nearly, what the best friends of 
education would have them to be. No doubt, 
many of the methods employed in them are 
faulty. Yet this system, though a purely con- 



152 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

ventional one, is now completely established, and 
cannot, under existing conditions, be exchanged 
for another. And, on the whole, it is a grand sys- 
tem, the very best that could at present, and 
when the entire country is considered, be put in 
operation. Our public common schools are doing 
a grand work. Not only are millions of the chil- 
dren of our own people taught in them, and better 
taught than they would be without them, but 
other millions of children, born abroad, are wel- 
comed to their hospitable care, emancipated from 
traditions and limitations that would otherwise 
keep them down, and trained into soi^e degree of 
fitness for citizenship in a free State. Here, now, 
is a vast and beneficent instrumentality, which we 
cannot hope either to supplant or to replace, and 
which practically controls the education of this 
mighty people. What attitude shall the Church 
assume towards it ? I say frankly, the Church 
should enter cordially and without reserve into 
the most intimate possible relations with it, not 
only because it is fixed and established, but be- 
cause as things are, and all things considered, it 
is the best general system of education that can 
be devised, and because it is capable of being 



^ 



iv.] To Civil Society. 153 

made still better by the influence which the 
Church is competent to bring to bear upon it. 
Let us frankly accept the fact that our common 
schools are secular; and let us realize, that, so 
long as they are under State control, it is not only 
inevitable, but best, that they should be so ; and 
let us bring Christianity to bear upon them in the 
legitimate and appointed channels of Christian 
influence. Let us see to it that domestic religion 
shall be revived, that sponsorship shall become a 
reality once more, aryd that our clergy may be 
pastors indeed of their flocks, feeding and caring 
for the lambs as well as the sheep. Let us see 
to it that our children shall go forth in the morn- 
ing out of the portals of Christian homes, bearing 
with them the gladness and the peace of Chris- 
tian nurture ; and that, when they return thither, 
they shall be once more surrounded with all the 
holy influences of domestic piety. Let their par- 
ents and sponsors and pastors bring them up in 
the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and it 
will not so much matter if the school to which 
they go for a few hours each day is altogether 
secular. If it be asked, What shall be the case of 
those children who do not live in Christian homes ? 



154 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

the answer is, it is the Church's special work in 
this world to make their homes Christian. Let 
the blessed influences of Christianity radiate into 
all the homes of the land. In this way teachers 
and parents, as well as children, may be reached. 
In this way, and along the channels of domestic 
and social life, the enlightening and ennobling in- 
fluences of Christianity may be applied to our 
public schools as well as to the children within 
them. In this way, at last, our system of popular 
education may be made Christian in a deeper 
sense than would necessarily be indicated, even by 
ecclesiastical direction and control ; and so, spite 
of all disadvantages, we may still realize for this 
land the old promise, " All thy children shall be 
taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace 
of thy children." 

What has hitherto been said has related chiefly 
to the common or elementary schools of the 
country. The same principles apply to higher 
education. We look to the Church and the home 
to keep watch and ward over our common schools. 
We look to Christian fathers and mothers and 
Christian pastors to keep the hearts of the chil- 
dren true, and their feet in the paths of Christian 



IV.] To Civil Society. 155 

knowledge and peace. The same instrumentali- 
ties must be relied on at our institutions of more 
advanced learning. Around each great univer- 
sity, Christian colleges, halls or homes should be 
builded, within which the Christian youth of the 
land might reside while attending the university 
classes, and over which strong Christian men 
should preside, not so much to teach religious 
truth as to fill the lives of the students with a 
religious spirit. In this land the educational 
training of the young has been delegated to a 
system of secular schools and universities. Be 
it so. Some of these seats of higher learning are 
nobly planned and completely equipped. Let us 
frankly and thankfully accept the fact ; and let 
the Church, released as she is from the work of 
the classroom, betake herself gladly to her own 
particular function, and build up around each uni- 
versity, and around the lives of her children there, 
the hallowing, sanctifying influences of Chris- 
tianity. To do this is not an easy work, but it is 
the Church's appointed work. Not to teach the 
trivium or quadrivium, but to teach men to ob- 
serve the things which Christ commanded, — this 
is her appointed work ; and she ought to do the 



156 The Relatioji of Christia,7tity. [Lect. iv.] 

latter with all the more energy because she is re- 
leased from the drudgery of the former. And the 
Church will do her work all the more effectively 
when it is once thoroughly realized that Chris- 
tianity is to be taught, not like a problem of 
Euclid or an ode of Horace, but through Chris- 
tian nurture, and by the help of the Spirit of 
God. 



LECTURE V. 



CHARITY. 



LECTURE V. 



CHARITY. 



M For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may 
do them good." — St. Mark xiv. 7. 

r I ^HAT destitution should continue to exist 
-*■ among men has been for ages the oppro- 
brium of political economy. All kinds of combi- 
nations and arrangements have been proposed, 
and many of them have been tried, in the vain 
attempt to banish it from human society. Phi- 
losophers have dreamed of model republics, where 
want should be unknown. Politicians, and trib- 
unes of the people, have proposed and sometimes 
secured the enactment of agrarian laws, the 
objects of which were to so limit and distribute 
property as to provide for the wants of all. Vast 
colonizing movements have set sail from crowded 
or inhospitable shores, and have driven their keels 
into foreign sands, in the hope, that, under fairer or 
more propitious skies, there should be found such 

159 



160 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

abundance that human indigence should have no 
place. Malthusian theories, Fourierite plans, and 
communistic organizations, have been suggested, 
and sometimes put into operation, to satisfy the 
obtrusive want that dogs the steps of human 
progress ; but all in vain. The fact of human 
destitution remains in every land ; and we dare not 
say that it has grown less importunate, or less 
unwelcome and menacing to the mere economist 
and civilian, as the world has advanced in civiliza- 
tion. Nor can it be claimed, that the Christian 
Church has yet propounded a solution of the diffi- 
culties by which the State has hitherto been 
baffled. Both Church and State have elaborated 
systems for the relief and care of pauperism, 
which have been worked with a zeal, an intelli- 
gence, a devotion, and a wealth of resource, that 
have left nothing of their kind to be desired. 
Yet the stubborn fact remains, that the tide of 
indigent wretchedness does not abate, but is ris- 
ing, rather, throughout the Christian world. 

The methods, whether ecclesiastical or civil, 
which are here referred to as having been tried 
without success, may all be designated by the 
common term, corporate, or institutional, relief. 



v.] To Civil Society. 161 

And however diverse the motives upon which 
these have rested, yet it is but fair to allow, that, 
in Christian lands, all of them have been honest 
attempts to do good to the poor in accordance 
with Christ's commandment. Before we proceed, 
then, to consider the causes of their failure, it 
will be well to inquire what Christ's plan was for 
dealing with human poverty. We shall then be 
in a condition to estimate the shortcomings of our 
human methods, and finally to seek a return to 
the right way. And the first characteristic of our 
Lord's attitude towards human poverty, as it 
seems to me, is, that he frankly recognized the 
inevitable persistence of it. In his teaching he 
almost reiterated the precept of the elder law, 
which said, " The poor shall never cease out of 
the land : therefore I command thee, saying, Thou 
shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to 
thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land." But 
Jesus, while he did this, did vastly more. He 
implicitly declared the presence and the need of 
the poor to be the perpetual opportunity and the 
unfailing blessing of his people. More profoundly 
than the elder law-giver he saw the social and 
political law on which the fact rested ; and he saw, 



1 62 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

too, how, out of the evil, there might arise abun- 
dant good. Yet the optimism of his view did not 
originate in any sort of indifference to human 
suffering. Far otherwise. More deeply and ten- 
derly than any other man he was touched with 
compassion for the poor. More keenly and 
vividly than any other statesman he realized the 
anguish of human destitution. More exactly than 
any other economist, as I trust we shall see, he 
projected methods for the alleviation of its woes. 
Nevertheless, he admitted the persistence of it, 
and based upon this fact many of the most char- 
acteristic duties of his system of ethics. It is a 
fact of deep significance, that Christianity itself, 
both as taught and exemplified by its Author, was 
founded on the law of ministry to human need. 
In order to fulfil this law, he himself came into 
the world. His whole earthly career may be 
tersely described by the single phrase, He went 
about doing good. In sending out his disciples 
two and two before his face, he charged them 
with service to the poor. All his ethical teach- 
ings took the presence of the poor for granted, 
and he constantly enjoined ministry to them. To 
do good, not of abundance merely, but by self- 



v.] To Civil Society. 163 

denial ; to do good, and lend, hoping for nothing 
again, — he declared to be the highest human duty, 
and privilege also ; since by so doing, and only so, 
might men become the children of their Father in 
heaven. Nay, in one striking passage he identi- 
fied- himself with the poor, and declared that 
ministry to them, in their hunger and nakedness 
and squalor and wretchedness, was ministry to 
him, and entitled to his gratitude and an eternal 
reward. So completely, then, did he admit the 
inevitable persistence of poverty, that he adjusted 
the whole of his ethical system to the treatment 
of it, and made the proper treatment of it the 
indispensable condition of his favor, and of access 
to the joys of heaven. 

Acknowledging, then, the persistence of human 
destitution, he did not seek to banish it from his 
kingdom. "Ye have the poor with you always." 
But while he profoundly commiserated their state, 
and urgently enjoined the duty of ministering 
to them, he yet enacted that this duty should 
be wholly voluntary: "Whensoever ye will ye 
may do them good." He furthermore enacted, 
that it should be, not only voluntary, but that 
it should be personal, and performed in a manner 



164 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

altogether unobtrusive, and devoid of publicity ; 
annexing to this personal and secret quality the 
condition of his approbation. And it is not less 
notable, that he enjoined the duty of doing good 
to the poor upon all, — not upon the rich only, 
but upon the poor also. All are to engage in it, 
from the beggar to the king; the injunction to do 
this resting upon the Fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man. "A new commandment 
give I unto you, that ye love one another." " Be 
merciful, as your Father is merciful," "that ye 
may be the children of your Father which is in 
heaven." 

The mere statement of Christ's attitude towards 
the poor brings forward some grave and momen- 
tous questions, which must be asked, and ought 
to be answered. Has not civil society assumed 
an attitude towards the poor, not only different 
from, but at variance with, that of Christ ? And 
how far has the Church adopted the false attitude 
of civil society, and abandoned that of the Mas- 
ter? I believe that the* charges suggested by 
these questions are true to a much greater extent 
than is commonly supposed : and I believe, that 
in this fact is to be found the secret of that wide- 



v.] To Civil Society. 165 

spread alienation between rich and poor, and 
of the no less wide-spread indifference of both 
classes to religion, which we all deplore ; while 
to the same cause is to be attributed the grow- 
ing disaffection of the poorer classes to all civil 
government, that is one of the most portentous 
signs of the times. First let us consider the 
attitude assumed towards the poor by civil soci- 
ety. 

Perhaps there is no department of political 
history more interesting to the statesman than 
the history of poor-law legislation. Fortunately 
the sources of information on this subject are 
abundant and easily accessible. It is not too 
much to say, that, for more than two and a half 
centuries, the attention of English economists has 
been lavished without stint upon this most impor- 
tant subject; while for more than half a century 
publicists of every Christian nation have been 
engaged in gathering, arranging, and discussing 
the statistics of poor-law relief throughout the 
Christian world. Manifestly, then, not even a 
sketch of its history can be here attempted ; since 
the bare enumeration of the changes and exper- 
iments introduced into the English system alone, 



1 66 The Relation of Christianity [lect. 

would far exceed our limits. It must suffice to 
say, that poor-law legislation, in our modern sense 
of the word, began in England, in the reign of 
Elizabeth, with the Act of 1601, which has been 
called the " foundation and text-book of English 
poor law." x Before that time, there had been 
many attempts to deal with destitution by legis- 
lative enactment ; but the measures devised were 
rather repressive than remedial, and were so 
severe and even ferocious as to deserve the name 
of penal statutes. One of the worst impeach- 
ments of mediaeval society is found in the cruelty 
with which crime was punished and the inhuman- 
ity with which poverty was repressed by the State 
down to the period of the Reformation. Previous 
to that time, the work of poor relief had been 
undertaken by the Church ; vast revenues having 
been intrusted to her for that purpose. Of the 
failures and abuses of ecclesiastical charities we 
must speak presently. With the suppression 
of many of the religious establishments, and the 
spoliation of the remainder, the resources which 
had been employed for the relief of destitution 
were no longer available ; and the question of 

1 Fowle's Poor Law, p. 58. 



v.] To Civil Society. \6j 

caring for the needy became in the last degree 
urgent and menacing. No doubt, the growing 
spirit of humanity which distinguished the Refor- 
mation period moved the brilliant statesmen of 
the Elizabethan era to attempt some measures 
of poor relief by law ; but it cannot be denied, 
that the most powerful motives were the selfish 
desire of the rich to escape from the burden 
of alms-giving, and the no less selfish purpose of 
the civilians of that time to pacify the realm, and 
strengthen the existing order by stilling the 
importunities of the poor. Of the many muta- 
tions of English poor-law we cannot now speak ; 
nor need we dwell on the dreary evidences of fail- 
ure, that have certainly not diminished to the 
present time, notwithstanding the immense re- 
sources of experience and practical philanthropy 
that have been brought to bear upon the adminis- 
tration of it. Our own American system of legal 
relief is mainly a reproduction of the English ; 
though it must be claimed, that our system is, on 
the whole, better organized, and that, of late years 
at least, our publicists have availed themselves 
of a wider study of European methods, and have 
been able to improve upon the English system 



1 68 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

in some important particulars. Our American 
system, however, is so far from being uniform, 
that it must be described in general terms only. 
Perhaps it will be sufficient to describe it in gen- 
eral terms as follows : In most, if not in all, of the 
States of the Union, relief for the destitute is pro- 
vided by taxation ; which relief is administered by 
commissioners and other officials, under State 
supervision, chiefly by means of public institu- 
tions, such as poorhouses, asylums, and reforma- 
tories of a remedial character. No matter what 
the original cause of the destitution may be, 
whether it be inherited infirmity, or misfortune, 
or vice, or improvidence, or incorrigible indolence, 
the moment a certain condition is reached, the 
right to public relief is established, and the 
pauper is entitled to be appropriately cared for 
under the provisions of the law. Whether the 
right to such relief can be enforced by an action 
at law, is a question that has been variously 
answered : but it cannot be doubted, that the 
claim of the pauper to his proper relief is a real 
and substantial one, not to be denied in the court 
of conscience and at the bar of public opinion ; * 

1 See Fowle's Poor Law, pp. 6, 7. 



v.] To Civil Society. 169 

nor is it easy to see how a refusal to enforce it by 
a court of law could be justified. 

There have been many ingenious attempts to 
formulate the principle upon which poor-law legis- 
lation is founded. One of the most earnest, but 
most moderate, defenders of the system admits 
that legal provision for the relief of the destitute 
seems "artificial and even unnatural ; for it estab- 
lishes a state of things in which persons are not 
obliged, unless they choose, to provide themselves 
with the means of subsistence : while those who 
work for their own living are compelled, whether 
they like it or not, to maintain those who will not 
or can not support themselves." J That such relief 
is founded in a natural right to the means of sub- 
sistence on the part of the pauper has been widely 
held : but the consequences of such a principle 
have been so immediately disastrous and danger- 
ous, that it has been everywhere peremptorily 
denied ; and the denial has been " erected into a 
maxim of State policy." 2 The other view, that 
"society is compelled, in the interests of its own 
self-preservation, to take some care of destitute 
persons," 3 can hardly be said to be the "princi- 

1 Fovvle's Poor Law, p. 1. 2 Ibid. p. 6. 3 Ibid. p. 5. 



170 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

pie " on which poor-law is founded, though this 
is gravely insisted on, but reduces legal relief to 
the category of a mere expedient devised in the 
interest of selfishness. No doubt, one of the 
motives of poor-law legislation may be thus de- 
fined ; but the principle upon which it has pro- 
ceeded deserves to be placed much higher in the 
scale of merit. A candid examination of poor-law 
history will prove, I think, that legal relief is an 
attempt to obey the injunction of Christ and the 
dictates of Christian humanity by making a sure 
and certain provision for human destitution. That 
the attempt has been a failure, I am going to try 
to show. It is also undeniable, I think, that the 
motive which has prompted this attempt has been 
largely mixed with selfishness. Relief by law has 
been adopted as a cheap and easy expedient. To 
quote once more from the author above referred 
to, even so zealous a defender of the English poor- 
law system, while he does not admit the truth of 
the charge, that it is "due neither to humanity 
nor genuine utilitarianism, but to the interests 
of mere class selfishness," does admit, that "the 
true statement of the case would seem to be, 
that the selfishness of the upper classes took 



v.] To Civil Society. 171 

advantage of the growing spirit of humanity, 
and made a kind of tacit bargain with it." ' 
Nevertheless, the principle upon which poor- 
law legislation has always really proceeded, is 
the principle, as I have said, of administering 
charity by law. 

That poor-law legislation has failed to attain 
its object, or, in other words, that legal relief of 
destitution has been, not only ineffective, but 
actually disastrous to the best interests of human 
benevolence and of human well-being, seems to 
me to be shown by the following considerations. 
In the first place, as a charitable instrumentality, 
legal relief defeats itself at the outset ; since charity 
by law is impossible, being a contradiction of terms. 
The moment relief ceases to be personal and vol- 
untary, it ceases to be charity. Nor is this all. It 
defeats itself in another notable particular. In 
order to entitle a person to become a beneficiary 
of legal relief, all that is necessary is, that he 
should be reduced by misfortune, improvidence, 
or vice to a state of indigence. But the moment 
he sinks to this condition, and accepts the provis- 
ion made for it by law, he becomes a pauper. 

1 Fowle's Poor Law, p. 14. 



172 The Relation of Chris tiaiiity [Lect. 

While he was simply a needy person, and before 
he availed himself of the legal bounty arranged 
for his relief, he was simply one of the poor.- 
The moment after he accepted such relief, he 
became a pauper. There is a distinction, then, 
between pauperism and poverty ; and it is the 
characteristic of the poor-law, that it created 
pauperism, and thrust it in poverty's place. But 
the pauper is not any longer a poor man. He has 
a property in the public provision arranged for his 
support. He has a right, as we have seen, to the 
bounty set apart for him by taxation. We are 
entitled to remark, then, that the poor-law sys- 
tem completely misses the object for which it was 
created. It undertook to provide for the poor 
man ; and, behold, it has converted him into a 
pauper with a property in the provision made for 
him. Now, whether we conclude that this is a 
benefit, or the reverse, — that this transformation 
from poverty to pauperism is an elevation or a 
degradation, — certain it is that the effect of the 
poor-law takes relief altogether out of the cate- 
gory of charity. It is simply a question of legal 
duty on the one side, and of lawful right on the 
other. The expedient of legal relief, then, has 



v.] To Civil Society. 173 

failed, as an agency for administering charity to 
the poor. 

But, further, the creation of pauperism has not 
only failed in this respect, but it has proved vastly 
hurtful to the interests of benevolence. The 
wants of poverty are not as well cared for, the 
needs of destitution are not as well ministered to, 
as they would be if this device of civil society 
were altogether swept away. The reason is, that, 
because society has adopted this artificial and 
mistaken method, there are certain natural chan- 
nels of supply that are seriously obstructed. And, 
first, the degrading and disabling effect of the poor- 
laws upon the poor themselves is to be noted. 
The strongest instinct of our nature is the instinct 
of self-preservation. With many necessity is the 
only motive-power masterful enough to get things 
done. The instinct of self-preservation, if rightly 
developed, will lead men to look to the future ; and 
there are multitudes of those who live and must 
live near the borderland of want who can be in- 
duced to look ahead, and provide for the future, by 
no less urgent and inexorable law. Now, it is a 
fact, that, among such classes, improvidence is the 
rule ; and it is more than a mere economic evil. 



174 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

It means self-indulgence and selfishness, instead 
of self-control and self-sacrifice. It means riotous 
living ; as all wasting of one's substance, be it 
much or little, is : and this is induced by the un- 
conscious feeling which poor-laws are precisely 
fitted to produce. The process is not often con- 
scious nor always logical. The feeling is, that the 
worst is provided for, — that want, absolute want, 
cannot befall. The truculent saying, that the 
world owes every man a living, seems to be regis- 
tered in a law of the land ; and we cannot wonder 
that it finds an echo in many a poor man's heart 
and life, encouraging him to live up to his means, 
and to be improvident. And let it not be forgot- 
ten, that the thought of pauperism, which is so 
dreadful to a man of competent means, is by no 
means so shocking to or remote from multitudes 
of those who live on the very verge of penury. 
Our poor-laws have done much to make such 
thoughts possible and not unwelcome. The 
county-house with its imposing exterior, the 
machinery of the administration of legal relief, 
the right to such relief which the law confers, — all 
these have tended to break the horror of the fall ; 
so that it is not too much to say, that, of the mul- 



v.] To Civil Society. 175 

titudes who find their way to our county-houses, 
not a few have been drawn thither by a kind of 
baleful and malefic attraction. This, then, is a 
grave charge against our whole system of legal 
relief, quite apart from any faults connected with 
the administration of it, that the very promise of 
such relief has created a demand for it by break- 
ing down the self-reliance, the foresight, the moral 
strength, of the poor. 

Another source of bounty to the poor that legal 
relief has largely impaired, is the natural obliga- 
tion and impulse that move the near relations of 
the helpless poor to take care of them. Perhaps 
the most detestable and alarming result of the 
poor-laws is the loosening of natural ties, the 
weakening of the bonds of natural affection, the re- 
lease of families from the obligation to take care 
of their own poor. If the facts could be accu- 
rately ascertained, a diseased condition of the 
lower ranks of the body politic in this respect 
would be disclosed that would be absolutely 
appalling. The aged poor are relegated to the 
poorhouse by unnatural sons and daughters all 
over the land. Among the poorer classes the dis- 
grace of it is often not felt. It is easy to plead 



Ij6 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

that it is not wrong to accept a provision which is 
a legal right. And the wrong is not done merely 
to the aged father and mother, who are often more 
than willing to escape to the peace of the poor- 
house ; but the wrong is done also to the children, 
who thus lose their parents in the worst sense, to 
their home, to their own lives, and their own 
souls, and to the lives and souls of their children. 
Happy the home beside whose portal the aged sit 
in the calm peace of declining years, while their 
sons and daughters gain dignity and honor from 
God and man as they pay back in some degree 
the debt of love and reverence which they owe to 
parental care ! and woe to the homes, the chil- 
dren, and the land where the aged no longer sit in 
the doors of the poor ! And that this woe is 
stealing over our land is not more evident than 
that it is largely due to the relaxation of family 
obligations which our poor - laws have partly 
brought about. The very fact that he knows 
legal provision to have been made, and that abso- 
lute want cannot visit those belonging to him, is 
sufficient in multitudes of cases to set the truant 
husband, the unnatural child, the selfish brother, 
free from the slight bond that would otherwise 



v.] To Civil Society. 177 

hold him to duty ; and so large numbers of those 
whom natural affection ought to care for are con- 
signed to the bounty of public relief. And, in 
doing this, the home and the family life of the 
poor are being desecrated. The most sacred and 
humanizing of all the natural affections are neu- 
tralized among those who need them most. Self- 
ishness is working its deadly alienations in the 
dwellings of the poor. 

In the next place, the legal provision that has 
been made for the relief of penury has had a 
chilling and paralyzing effect upon the bounty 
and charity of the rich. The poor-laws are a wel- 
come and favorite device of the independent 
classes, who are often not loath to believe in the 
sufficiency of their own method. Moreover, the 
effect of the poor-law is, to exile the paupers, and 
still their importunity. But, above all, it has 
changed the attitude of the poor themselves from 
the gentle and amiable attitude of exigence and 
gratitude to the truculent attitude of demand and 
resentment. 1 The result is disastrous in the last 
degree, not only to the poor, but to the rich as 
well. I think it is capable of being demonstrated, 

1 Fowle's Poor Law, p. 13. 



178 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

that, if the poor were left to the voluntary care of 
their more fortunate neighbors, there would be no 
lack of abundant means to provide for their real 
necessities. But the matter of providing for the 
poor is not wholly nor even chiefly a question of 
money. The rich have something vastly more 
precious and helpful than money, which they 
ought to give, but which, under our present sys- 
tem, is too often not given ; and that is, personal 
sympathy, personal interest, personal friendliness 
and good will, to be manifested, as they can only 
be manifested, in the frank and unrestricted inter- 
course between rich and poor. One of the evil 
results of our present system is, that the poor are 
largely bereaved of the personal sympathy of the 
rich. And not less is the loss to the rich them- 
selves. They are deprived of the gratitude, the 
friendship, the friendliness, of the poor. The 
softening, elevating influence of benefactorship 
is taken from them. Princely though their gifts 
may be, and large their charities, yet these go 
through legal or institutional channels too often, 
and meet no return of thanks, or of gratitude 
even : such givers never hear the sweetest music 
that ever greets human ears, — the music of the 



v.] To Civil Society. 179 

benediction of the poor. Not merely, then, for 
the sake of the poor, but for the sake of the rich 
also, we ought to plead and pray for the old 
method of charity by love instead of charity by 
law. Verily, it is always and everywhere hard for 
the rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven ; 
but by pauperizing the poor, and banishing them 
in their unloveliness and squalor, we have made it 
harder still for the rich to win the plaudit of the 
Master, " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one 
of the least of these my brethren, ye have done 
it unto me." 

But there is another resource of helpfulness to 
the poor, which is vaster and more important than 
any that I have yet named ; and this, too, is ob- 
structed and impaired by our present system. I 
mean the sympathy and helpfulness which the 
poor would extend to each other if left to the 
natural promptings of benevolence and charity. 
The most precious of all the gifts of sympathy 
and help that ever come to the poor man in his 
distress are the heartfelt sympathy and help of 
his neighbors, of those who live around his dwell- 
ing. The nameless and numberless sweet chari- 
ties of neighborliness that come in the natural 



180 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

order of things, unbidden, from those who live 
hard by, — these are the sweetest and most help- 
ful of all benefactions. They not only cheer and 
gladden the poor man's lot, but they teach him self- 
respect and self-help as nothing else can. And it 
is, perhaps, the worst impeachment of our legal 
system, that it has done much — far more than 
most of us are aware of — to dry up these sources 
of consolation. He who studies the condition of 
the indigent classes is struck by the lack of broth- 
erly kindness among them. There may be guilds 
and sodalities and combinations among them ; but 
these result from community of opinion or inter- 
est, and not from mere propinquity, mere neigh- 
borhood, and neighborliness. We have seen how, 
in the multitude that live on the verge of want, 
our system has relaxed the bonds of family affec- 
tion. It has had the same effect in preventing 
the interchange of charity among the poor. And, 
in drying up this source of help and comfort, the 
lives of our poor are doubly impoverished and 
doubly desolated. The poor man is bereaved of 
the help of his neighbor, and of the opportunity 
to help his neighbor. The virtue and the grace 
of helpfulness, of sympathy, of charity, have been 



v.] To Civil Society. 181 

made difficult, and sometimes almost impossible, 
to him. 

But not alone to the rich and the poor as 
classes, but to civil society as a whole, the result 
of our system of legal relief has been most dis- 
astrous. The increasing alienation between the 
two ranks of society is largely due to the causes 
here suggested. The natural bond between the 
rich and the poor has been sundered. The 
natural law which binds them together has been 
in large degree set aside. We do not often think, 
perhaps, how indispensable a factor poverty is in 
civilization and progress. It is hardly too much 
to say, if there was no poverty, there could be no 
wealth. Certainly, without poverty wealth would 
be of little value. It is no depreciation o'f the 
dignity of even the humblest labor to say, that the 
more menial and unwelcome offices of life would 
never be done by one man for another unless the 
need of the one and the affluence of the other 
brought it about. If there were no poor, every 
man would have to do these offices for himself ; 
and there could be no large administrations of 
business or commerce, no domestic elegance, no 
learned leisure, no patronage of art. Indeed, in 



1 82 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

the true sense of the word, there could be no rich 
if there were no poor. The poor, then, are quite 
as indispensable to the rich, to say the least, as 
the rich are to the poor. Their fortunes should 
be bound up together. It is an unnatural and an 
evil condition that separates them and antago- 
nizes them instead of making them the friends 
that they ought to be ; and, whenever this aliena- 
tion takes place, the rift has begun, which, slowly 
widening, must throw civil society at last into 
chaos. To the question, then, What shall be done 
to avert this, the most alarming evil of our times, 
and bring the rich and poor together again ? there 
is but one answer. It is not by legal or mechani- 
cal relief that it can be done, no matter how boun- 
tiful. It is not by the diffusion of intelligence 
merely. It is not by external force. It must be 
done by flinging all classes, rich and poor alike, 
back on the old law of mutual helpfulness and 
sympathy ; by discontinuing charity by law, and 
relying on the charity of love. 

These arguments are sufficiently cogent, it 
seems to me, from the stand-point of our common 
humanity. Their urgency is immeasurably in- 
creased when we come to consider them from the 



V.] To Civil Society. 183 

stand-point of the Christian. Our present system 
of legal relief is a grievous wrong to the Church 
and the cause of Christianity. By substituting 
charity by law for the charity of love, we have 
deprived the Church, in some measure at least, of 
her noblest work, of her most precious opportu- 
nity. Far more precious, not only to those to 
whom she ministers, but also to herself and her 
ministering servants, than any ministry of truth 
and light, is her ministry of love. To minister to 
human want and human sorrow, — this is her 
privilege and her mission. Bereave her of this, 
and you rob her of her most precious power. 
It is in exercising her ministry to human need 
that she realizes her mastery, and her only real 
mastery, over the souls of men. Only so, — not 
otherwise. It is not till the rich man feels his 
need, that the Church can reach and minister to 
him. No more can she reach the poor man, un- 
less she offers ministry to his need also. Failure 
to do this, is the reason why so many churches 
are unfilled by the poor. It is not because the 
poor feel out of place. It is not because they 
prefer to company with one another. It is be- 
cause the one, only appeal that can reach them is 



184 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

not made ; and that is, the appeal of personal sym- 
pathy and love. It is not by preaching merely ; 
it is not by music merely ; it is not by ritual or 
the absence of it ; it is not by mechanical guilds 
and unions merely, nor sham tea-drinkings and 
sociables : it can be done only in the old way in 
which Christ did it, and commissioned his Church 
to do it; that is, by going about doing good; by 
carrying the gospel and sweet human sympathy 
and friendliness into the homes, the hiding-places, 
of the poor. And this brings us to say, that 
neither has the Church been altogether blameless 
in this matter. For a long time the Church has 
been inclined to adopt wholesale expedients, to 
rely largely on official methods, and to substitute 
institutional charity for the old-fashioned personal 
charity of love. 

The study of religious institutional charity is 
full of profoundest interest. It had its origin in 
ecclesiastical monasticism, and owes its develop- 
ment to the conditions which in turn acted on the 
monastic life, and were created by it. Time does 
not permit me to more than sketch its history. 
The cenobitic, or monastic, life does not owe its 
origin to Christianity. It sprang out of certain 



v.] To Civil Society. 185 

natural impulses of human nature, and had 
existed for centuries in the East, and for a long 
time among the Jews before the coming of Christ. 
Under the stress of heathen persecution, however, 
the early Christians, partly by the accident of 
exile, and partly by choice, were led to seek ref- 
uge in its seclusion ; and it soon came to pass, 
that the lauri of the Thebaid and the caves of 
Syria were filled with Christian hermits, who 
devoted themselves to a contemplative life. Un- 
der the influence of Antony, — a noble Egyptian, 
— and other like-minded men, something like 
order and organization began to grow up among 
these scattered recluses, until, by reason of the 
patronage and example of the pious and well-born, 
monasticism became thoroughly established. The 
political and social condition of Western Christen- 
dom after the irruption of the barbarians rendered 
monastic institutions peculiarly useful. They were 
the only asylums for a long time wherein the de- 
fenceless and oppressed could find a refuge from 
the cruelty and rapacity of robber chieftains and 
feudal despots. Within their quiet and peaceful 
shades, moreover, learning was kept alive ; and the 
gentler arts of peace survived in an age which 



1 86 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

would otherwise have crushed them by force of 
arms. Beyond all question, the cause of learning 
and of humanity owes a large debt of gratitude to 
the monks of the Middle Ages, and to their mon- 
asteries and schools. Yet the good that they did 
was not unmixed with evil. It has been pointed 
out with much force, that they did vast evil in 
withdrawing the nobler natures, the gentler 
spirits, the real heroes of love and self-sacrifice, 
from society and from the economies of life, and 
leaving the race to be propagated, and its prac- 
tical destinies to be shaped, by the selfish, the 
fierce, the brutal, the cruel. Not less disastrous 
was the effect of the withdrawal of the sweet 
charities of the gospel from the homes and the 
home-life of the people, and the transfer of these 
charities to the wicket of the monastery gate, to 
the cloister of the nunnery, to the asylum, and the 
orphanage. A celibate and monkish clergy, and 
cenobitic sisterhoods, in withdrawing from the 
homes of the people, discontinued the pastoral 
office, recalled the ministries of religion and 
charity from the fireside, abandoned the dwellings 
of the people to barbarism, degraded the family, 
and substituted the devotions of the oratory and 



v.] To Civil Society. 187 

the cell for family religion and domestic piety. 
The result was, that institutional charity took the 
place, to a large extent, of the charity of house to 
house visitation, of personal and pastoral care, and 
of neighborly brotherly love. So vast did the evils 
of the system grow, that reformation after refor- 
mation became absolutely necessary ; and, in Eng- 
land especially, the strong arm of the law had to 
be interposed again and again, to limit, to regu- 
late, and to control such charities. Certain it is, 
that the evils of their internal administration were 
enormous ; and no less evil was their influence on 
many of their beneficiaries. ' The dole at the 
monastery gate was quite as efficacious as the 
relief of the modern "poor-master" in degrading 
and pauperizing the poor. 

The day of monasticism is over, at least in 
Western Christendom. No effort and no combi- 
nation can ever restore it to its old place of 
influence. Nevertheless, the evil of it is not erad- 
icated, but survives in many forms. The poor- 
laws are themselves a modification of it ; the object 
being, to transfer the administration of charity 
from the chapter-house to the county-board, — to 
substitute the relief of law for the dole of the 



1 88 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

monastery wicket. Moreover, it survives in the in- 
stitutional charity of the Roman-Catholic Church, 
and in the tendency of all religious bodies to 
merge their charities in the same institutionalism. 
A careful study of the Roman-Catholic system, 
and of the condition of the Roman-Catholic poor, 
would bring some significant facts to light. It 
would be seen, I venture to assert, that, under 
that system, the domestic life of the Roman- 
Catholic poor is largely uncared for ; that family 
religion is almost unknown among them ; that 
their homes are, to a large extent, unvisited and 
neglected. If one 4s sick, there is the hospital ; 
if one is orphaned, there is the orphanage ; if one 
is destitute and old, there is the retreat : but home 
is not the sanctuary nor the refuge ; home is 
stripped of its sacredness, and the charitable 
institution is exalted and glorified. The effect 
of all this is seen in the fact, that, in those com- 
munities composed partly of Roman Catholics 
and partly of Protestants, by far the largest part 
of the destitution belongs to the former. And 
this destitution is often outcast and vicious, hiding 
in slums, breeding paupers and criminals. Pas- 
toral work, in the true sense of the word, is rare 



v.] To Civil Society. 189 

among the Roman-Catholic clergy, as is natural 
with a priesthood who have no family ties, and 
know little or nothing of domestic life ; and per- 
sonal charity is swallowed up, to a large extent, 
by institutional charity. I would not detract 
aught from the praise that is due to the self-deny- 
ing and self-sacrificing orders and sisterhoods of 
that communion. I do not deny that much good 
is done through their many institutions and instru- 
mentalities of charitable work. I only say, that 
these last have been far from an unmixed good. 
In so far as they have overshadowed the family 
and home life, withdrawn the ministries of religion 
from the dwellings of the people, and substituted 
a charity of system for a charity of personal love, 
they have occasioned enormous evil. They have 
paralyzed the choicest agency that the Christian 
Church can use in winning the hearts of the poor, 
and correcting the selfishness of the rich. It is 
the shadow of the monastery that blights and 
withers the home-life of Italy and Spain ; and 
institutionalism constitutes the weakness, and not 
the strength, of Romanism in America to-day. 

But the evil is not confined to Romanism. 
Among all religious bodies, there is a tendency 



190 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

to confide to religious organizations and institu- 
tions what ought to be done by persona] charity. 
Extreme Protestants have been disposed to follow 
the impulse of that Puritanism and independency 
of which we have already spoken, and to make 
the administration of charity a political affair, or 
a mere department of the State. Roman Catho- 
lics have tended, for a different reason, as we have 
seen, to confide it to ecclesiastical machinery. 
It remains for us, if we will, to adopt as ours the 
gospel plan, and, in working it wisely and unwea- 
riedly, to win for our heritage the poor of this 
land. But, before we proceed to consider the 
function of Christianity in this behalf, let us first 
inquire how Christianity and civil society are 
related in the administration of charity. 

Recurring to the philosophic idea of civil soci- 
ety, it is easy to see that the State will have such 
authority and power in the matter of caring for 
the destitute as are delegated to it, and no more. 
The State, as such, is under no inherent or pater- 
nal obligation to care for indigence. Poor-laws 
are simply a political arrangement, a civic device, 
whereby the body politic agrees to place a certain 
sum, raised by taxation, in the public treasury, 



v.] To Civil Society. 191 

and to employ the civic authorities to apply and 
administer the same. It may be granted, that 
such power and authority may be properly dele- 
gated to the State. Granting this, however, one 
or two important conclusions arise, which have 
already been indicated, one of which may here be 
stated again. That is, that, whatever this provis- 
ion may be, it is not charity. Whatever obliga- 
tion rests upon a man to be charitable cannot be 
discharged, in whole or in part, in this way. For 
charity, however deliberate and prudent, must be 
both personal and voluntary. It must be the vol- 
untary expression of an inward affection. It must 
be a pure and unqualified gift, .or it is not charity. 
But relief provided by legal enactment cannot be 
this. The beneficiary has a right to it : it is his 
property. Legal relief, then, is not charity at all, 
and, from the nature of the case, cannot be. 
That it is not wise and efficacious has already 
been demonstrated, but the effort to make it 
efficacious has arisen out of a natural impulse 
of our common humanity. Christ took this im- 
pulse, and transformed it. He spiritualized it, 
transmuting pity into charity. He took it into 
his service, confiding to it the lofty mission of 



192 The Relation of Christianity [lect. 

healing the sicknesses, consoling the sorrows, and 
ministering to the destitution, of the human race. 
And, as knowing that a grace so tender and so 
divine could not exist in an atmosphere of selfish- 
ness or officialism, he charged his disciples, say- 
ing, "Take heed that ye do not your alms before 
men, to be seen of them." "But when thou 
doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy 
right hand doeth : that thine alms may be in 
secret : and thy Father which seeth in secret 
himself shall reward thee openly." In a word, 
he delegated this ministry to the personal and 
pastoral care of his servants and handmaids, and 
exemplified it in his own life of benediction 
and benefaction in the homes of the poor. 

Let us try, then, to understand that Christian 
charity cannot be made a matter of legal enact- 
ment at all. The attempt to do so has been dis- 
astrous to poor and rich alike. It belongs to the 
Church, according to Christ's appointment, to 
minister wisely and tenderly to the poor. This 
brings forward" certain practical questions which 
demand our consideration. First, it will be 
asked, shall our poor-laws be at once repealed, 
and our poorhouses shut up ? Since legal relief 



v.] To Civil Society. 193 

does not accomplish all that is desired, shall it be 
at once abandoned ? To this I answer, that, so 
far as mere resources are concerned, the poor-laws 
might, if practicable, be at once repealed. In a 
short time private charity could be relied on to 
supply more than would thus be given up. 
Nevertheless, to seek the repeal at once, or under 
existing conditions, of so mature a system, is not 
to be thought of. What remains to be done is, to 
make it more and more unnecessary and super- 
fluous. This, I think, is a work which we Chris- 
tians ought to propose to ourselves, and ever keep 
in view ; and this we can do only by taking such 
care of the poor, according to Christ's plan, that 
there shall be no paupers left in the land. 

But in the next place, in the doing of this, and 
in order to this, we must reconstruct to a great 
extent our charitable methods. Not only must 
charity be personal and voluntary, but it must be 
made to do the poor good. And this is to be 
accomplished, only by the manifold ministries of 
brotherly love. Unless the giving of money, then, 
shall do the poor good, it is not charity to give it. 
If it shall do them harm, we dare not give it. 
But, even when it is good to give, much, and 



194 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

sometimes all the good, depends on the manner of 
giving. " Give alms of thy goods " is only a part 
of the precept : the second is no less imperative 
and not less important, — " Never turn thy face 
from any poor man." Personal sympathy, per- 
sonal helpfulness, counsel, encouragement, em- 
ployment, the teaching of self-control, self-respect, 
self-reliance, in their homes, in their families, by 
their firesides, — these are the ministries of 
charity ; and these must be accompanied by the 
highest of all the ministries of love, or, rather, 
they must be made a part of the ministry of the 
gospel to the poor. 

What shall be done, then, with our institutional 
charity ? To this I answer, let us keep it up 
bravely, let us sustain it bountifully, let us admin- 
ister it wisely as long as it is necessary, but let us 
outgrow it as soon as we can. Doubtless, there 
will always be need of some charitable institu- 
tions ; but it ought to be a decreasing need. The 
more thoroughly we do our work in the homes 
and hearts of the poor, the less will such need be. 
The orphanage is, indeed, a blessed charity ; but 
more blessed is the state of that people whose 
orphans find Christian homes with relatives and 



v.] To Civil Society. 195 

neighbors. A home for the aged is a beautiful 
charity ; but far more beautiful is it to see the 
old sitting by the door or fireside of their chil- 
dren or grandchildren, and lending the benedic- 
tion of their presence to the homes of the poor. 
So also with more heroic institutions. It is a 
blessed thing to have a reform school, for instance, 
to which to send a bad boy ; but how much better 
it would be to so surround that poor boy's cradle 
and home with good influences, that he might be 
a good boy instead of a bad one. Reform schools 
are filled by the neglect of Christian people just 
as our poorhouses are filled. Christianity should 
propose to itself this end, to supersede all these 
institutions, whether civil or ecclesiastical. They 
are not the glory of a land. They are a reproach 
rather. And when we begin to feel this, and 
cease from our easy and self-sufficient pride in 
these things, we may hope to return to Christ's 
method of caring for the poor. 

To do this is the Church's present opportunity. 
It is along this line, as I believe, that she may 
win the masses, strengthen the State, and become 
the Church of this people. No doubt, the way is 
long and arduous ; but it is the way which Christ 



196 The Relation of Christianity. [Lect. v.] 

pointed out, and there is no other. Howbeit, we 
cannot hope to walk in it except we be endued 
with power from on high. There must be a re- 
vival of the true pastoral office among the clergy. 
There must be a genuine revival of brotherly 
love. There is no need of asking or waiting for 
the enactments of conventions and synods and 
councils. Such a movement cannot be set in 
operation by legislation. Let each pastor and 
congregation simply return to Christ's ways, and 
go to work ! Let us first accept the Master's say- 
ing, that the poor are to be with us always ; and 
then let us seek to gain and to learn from the 
Spirit the will and the way to do them good. 



LECTURE VI. 

THE ULTIMATE ISSUE. 



LECTURE VI. 

THE ULTIMATE ISSUE. 

" Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then ? Jesus an- 
swered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for 
this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. 
Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." — St. John xviii. yj. 

TN this passage we are told how the particular 
-*• issue which is now to engage our thought, and 
with the consideration of which this series of lec- 
tures is to end, was raised in the trial of our Lord. 
He had just repudiated once more, and in terms, 
all claim to temporal sovereignty. He had just 
declared, in the most solemn manner, that his 
kingdom was not of this world. But, as has been 
well pointed out, the words in which this renuncia- 
tion was made, "not only deny ; they affirm ; if not 
of this world, then of another world. They assert 
this other world before the representative of those 
who boasted of their ' orbis terrarum.' " l It was 
this implied claim to another kingdom that led to 

1 Alford, in loc. 

199 



200 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

Pilate's further question, in which, with disguised 
impatience and sarcasm, he asked, "Art thou a 
king then ? " Nevertheless, Pilate's question was 
not altogether sarcastic. He must have had some 
dim sense of the meaning that lay hid in the 
reserve of Jesus. He must have dimly felt that 
a new and strange conjuncture had been arrived 
at in the political history of the world, when, at 
the bar of the imperial power, there stood one 
who, though unarmed and defenceless, and who, 
though he repudiated earthly royalty, yet claimed, 
nevertheless, to be a king. Strange claim, and 
startling, too, in that cruel, haughty presence, 
and within that martial hall ! Strange and start- 
ling to the Caesar's representative, to hear that 
there was a kingdom which rested on something 
else than the might of arms; which could exist 
without measuring swords with Roman legionaries ; 
which earthly pomp could not overawe, and earthly 
power could not take away. "Art thou a king 
then ? " It raised the question which state-craft 
has ever since been propounding; too often unheed- 
ing, as Pilate did, the wonderful answer of Jesus, 
" Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was 
I born, and for this cause came I into the world, 



vi.] To Civil Society. 201 

that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every 
one that is of the truth heareth my voice." 

The kingdom which Jesus repudiated is here 
set over against the kingdom which he claimed. 
It will be instructive to contrast the one with the 
other. We have seen that the first, as represented 
by the imperial procurator, based its pretension to 
authority upon a certain divine right. Neverthe- 
less, in the thought of Jesus, its true authority, as 
we have also seen, rested simply on the consent, 
or, if you please, the submission, of the governed. 
The first contrast, then, between the kingdom 
repudiated by Jesus, and that claimed by him, 
which challenges our attention, arises out of the 
fact, that the one was from beneath, the other 
from above ; the one was merely secular and civil, 
the other was theocratic and spiritual ; the one 
was of this world, the other was not of this world. 
The distinction heretofore pointed out between the 
Church as a theocracy, and the State as a political 
and civil arrangement, which, however authorita- 
tive, yet derives its authority from human consent, 
was obviously present to the mind of Jesus. He 
pointed out, that the two kingdoms are not only 
not identical, but that they cannot be ; that they 



202 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

are incompatible, since they rest on principles 
wholly different. He not only asserted that his 
kingdom was not of this world, but he proceeded 
to show that it could not be, by further indicating 
the nature of his own royalty. And, in doing this, 
he spoke as one having inherent authority ; as one 
who was born for the purpose of exercising this 
dominion ; as one who came into the world to be a 
king. This, then, is the fundamental distinction 
between Church and State, between Christianity 
and civil society. The one is theocratic : the 
other is democratic, or popular. The one derives 
its real authority from beneath : the other, from 
above. The one is of this world : the other is not 
of this world. 

The next obvious point of contrast is found in 
the difference between the objects which are to 
be served by the two kingdoms. The object 
of the one is the maintenance of external order. 
The object of the other is the establishment of 
truth. The one has to do with those matters 
of expediency and propriety which are committed 
to it. The other has to do with the eternal things 
which concern the souls of men, and which each 
soul must face and deal with in his own person- 



vi.] To Civil Society. 203 

ality. By implication it is here declared, that with 
this latter function the kingdoms of this world 
have nothing whatever to do. In the peculiar 
claim which Jesus here made to exclusive do- 
minion in the realm of truth, he declared that the 
State has no right or authority over conscience. 
Not more distinctly did he himself repudiate the 
sword of secular power than he denied the right 
of the State to wield the sword of spiritual power; 
and, in making this distinction, he enacted the 
real separateness of Church and State, not only 
renouncing in terms the right of the Church to 
control or even interfere in things political, but 
also declaring, by necessary implication, that the 
dominion of the State does not rightly include 
the realm of conscience and the domain of truth. 
Could the distinction thus made have been always 
preserved in Christian thought, it is easy to see 
how the numberless evils of Byzantinism and the 
Papacy could never have arisen ; how almost all 
the strifes and contentions which have disgraced 
Christian history might have been avoided ; and 
how the real royalty of Christ might long since 
have been acknowledged, even in this world : for 
it is only by keeping steadily in view his own 



204 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

renunciation of temporal sovereignty, that we can 
realize his true sovereignty, and understand the 
breadth and the depth and the height of his own 
saying, that all power has been given to him, both 
in heaven and in earth. 

To the capital question, then, How is the doc- 
trine of the secular sovereignty of the State to be 
reconciled with the assertion of the divine royalty 
of Christ ? our Lord himself has supplied the 
answer. The two occupy different spheres, and 
rest on different bases of authority. The answer 
which he made at the bar of Pilate's judgment- 
hall was at once a complete assertion of his own 
kingship, and a complete vindication of himself 
from the charge of interfering with the proper 
function of the State. In other words, our Lord 
himself, in allowing the secular sovereignty of the 
State, and asserting his own divine royalty, de- 
clared that the two were not contradictory ; and 
the iniquity of Pilate's condemnation of him, 
which has been well called the most profligate 
crime in history, lies in the fact, that though 
he admitted the completeness of the answer of 
Jesus, and acknowledged, that, in making himself 
a king, he was not speaking against Caesar, yet 



vi.] To Civil Society. 205 

he weakly yielded to the clamor of the Jews, and 
condemned him, in whom he found no fault at all, 
to death. Let us, then, once more accept the 
definition of our Lord himself, so solemnly made 
in the supreme moment of his arraignment and 
trial, of the difference between his kingdom 
and the kingdoms of this world. Let us not 
refuse to adopt the discrimination which he so 
clearly made between the authority of the one 
as resting on his divine mission, and the authority 
of the other as resting on the consent or submis- 
sion of the people. Let us acknowledge with him, 
that the one is altogether theocratic, and the other 
wholly secular ; and that, while the sphere of 
the one is the domain of truth, the sphere of the 
other is civil and social order. The question 
remains, What effect does the enlarging and 
deepening of Christ's kingdom have upon the 
stability and authority of civil society ? 

In the first place, Christianity re-enforces the 
social impulse in which civil society originates, 
and which operates to hold it together. As man 
is by nature a "political being;" so Christianity 
strengthens the natural social appetency, not only 
by removing or breaking down the hinderances 



206 The Relation of Christianity [Lect 

of it, but by adding to it the strong motive-powei 
of brotherly love. I need not stay to prove that 
Christ first proclaimed the brotherhood of man, 
and based upon it the new commandment, that 
men should love one another ; that brotherly love 
is one of the characteristic graces of the Christian 
life ; * and that such charity or brotherly love can 
nowhere be found but under the influence and 
administration of the Spirit of God. Now, the 
operation of this new force in human history is 
nowhere so conspicuous as in the effect it has 
upon civil society. Selfishness, which is the very 
elemental cause of all social disorder, is attacked 
in its citadel, the human heart. All the disorderly 
vices, such as lust, violence, perfidy, are assailed 
by Christianity at their source. The love which 
works no ill to his neighbor, and is the fulfilling 
of the law, is supplied by Christianity to maintain 
and uphold social order at every point ; and, as 
an added motive, this characteristic affection of 
Christianity draws the bonds of civil society more 
closely together. The social compact becomes 
something more than a mere civil arrangement : 
it rests on something more than a merely natural 

1 Rom. xii. 10; i Thess. iv. 9; Heb. xiii. 1. 



vi.] To Civil Society. 207 

" appetitas societatis." It is re-enforced by an 
impulse of brotherly affection, which not only 
works no ill to his neighbor, but which seeks by 
combination and intercourse to do him good. In 
becoming a Christian, then, a man is made a bet- 
ter citizen ; and the State, whatever its form may 
be, has its true basis of authority strengthened 
by the Christianization of its people. 

But not only does Christianity re-enforce the 
social and political appetency upon which civil 
society is founded, but it also exalts and dignifies 
it. A new sanction is added to the obligation 
of it, in discovering to man his true dignity and 
destiny. In disclosing to the soul its relation 
to God, in bringing life and immortality to light, 
the transcendental truth is brought home to man, 
that he is more than a mere "political animal ; " 
that his true life is the life of his undying spirit ; 
and that all things which affect him here are 
to be measured and valued accordingly as they 
affect his spiritual well-being. And, in doing this, 
all his social impulses are ennobled, as well as 
made more cogent and authoritative. Man lives 
best in this world by living for another and a 
higher. The man lives to most purpose here 



208 The Relation of Christianity [lect. 

whose life here is felt by him to be a training for 
immortality. It is one of those profound truths 
peculiar to and characteristic of the gospel, that 
it is not by living for this world, but by living 
above it ; that it is not by fixing our regard on 
this lower life, but by losing it in our regard 
to a higher ; that it is not by seeking first and 
supremely the things of this world, but rather by 
seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteous- 
ness, — that man's noblest destiny, even in this 
life, is to be attained. And not only does Chris- 
tianity ennoble man by thus enlarging his horizon, 
but it also supplies him with the only energy 
which is adequate to enable him to realize his 
highest destiny, both hereafter and here. In a 
noble passage in the " Republic " of Plato, the 
Platonic Socrates is made to say of the man of 
understanding, that he will look at the city within 
him, and will regulate his life according to the 
ideals which are discernible there. " In heaven," 
he says, " there is laid up a pattern of such a city ; 
and he who desires may behold this, and, behold- 
ing, govern himself accordingly." * Nevertheless, 
the Platonic philosophy discovered no motive- 

1 Republic, bk. ix. 



vi.] To Civil Society. 209 

power sufficient to enable man to realize the heav- 
enly ideals to which it pointed him ; nor have 
other philosophers been more successful in their 
search for some moral energy with which to en- 
able and hold to its allegiance the frail and wander- 
ing heart. Christianity alone has done this, in 
supplying to man, not only a divine Ideal to love, 
to imitate, to worship, but also a divine Energy, 
even the Holy Spirit, to guide and to inspire those 
who love the Lord Jesus, and to enable them to 
have his mind, to yield to his will, and to feel, and 
repeat in compassionate tenderness for others, the 
beatings of his loving heart. Fashioned according 
to this Ideal, the man becomes a true lover of his 
country, because a true lover of his kind. His 
spiritual affections and appetences are all engaged 
on the side of civic peace and social order. Un- 
earthly motives are added to those of this lower 
life. The man is himself transformed : and all 
the impulses upon which civil society rests are 
strengthened, ennobled, and exalted at their source ; 
that is to say, in the individual conscience and the 
individual heart. 

Here, then, is the kingdom of Jesus. While, 
in the nature of the case, it does not, and can not 



210 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

when rightly considered, interfere with the king- 
doms of this world, it deals with the deep founda- 
tions upon which the kingdoms of this world 
must rest. Christianity, then, is related to civil 
society as a supernatural operation, a divine in- 
fluence affecting the individual man. This is the 
sole legitimate sphere of the influence of religion 
in politics. It does not rightly deal with govern- 
ment as such. It rightly claims no authority over 
the State, and rightly seeks no alliance with it. 
It does not rightly undertake to deal with men 
in the mass, but with the individual soul. But, 
within, this domain, Jesus the King is shaping the 
destiny of the world. And it is to be observed, 
that it has been only thus ; that it has been only 
by working in this way from the individual and 
with him ; that it has been only by maintaining 
this one point of relation, and operating through 
this one point of contact, between Christianity and 
civil society, — that Jesus has actually exercised 
in human history the royalty which he claimed for 
himself. Not otherwise has he wielded the scep- 
tre of his kingly power on earth. Not otherwise 
has he undertaken to shape the earthly destiny of 
man. But within this sphere, in the realm of con- 



vi.] To Civil Society. 211 

science, in the wide domain of spiritual or eternal 
truth, in the unseen courts of the soul, he has 
made his power felt ; and thus he has shown, in 
a far deeper sense than any earthly sovereignty 
could indicate, that all power has indeed been 
given to him in heaven and in earth. 

It is well seen, in the light of these considera- 
tions, how entirely salutary the effect of true 
Christianity must be upon civil and social order. 
While, undoubtedly, the tendency of Christian 
influence has been to secularize the State, and 
thus reduce it to its true place, yet it is not and 
can not be rightly in conflict with it. On the con- 
trary, as we have seen, it re-enforces its true au- 
thority, and also adds to its real power over the 
conduct of men. Hence, though Christianity, 
working in its proper sphere, has undoubtedly 
discredited despotism, and gone far to banish it 
from the earth ; yet it has strengthened rather 
than weakened the true and proper authority of 
the State. And this it must do more and more 
if left free to work in its proper sphere. 'AH its 
appropriate and essential influences tend towards 
the upbuilding and strengthening of civil society. 
In our own land, where the true basis of civil 



212 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

society is recognized, and where the Church is 
emancipated from State interference and State 
control, the service done to civil and social order 
by Christianity is incalculable. And this service 
is great and salutary because it is rendered in the 
proper domain of Christian influence, not to the 
State as such, and not to the people through 
the State, but to the souls of the men who con- 
stitute the State ; thus applying its benign and 
wholesome influence to the very sources of politi- 
cal authority. Nor is it to be forgotten, that the 
service which religion renders to the State is not 
less, but is really greater and more salutary, be- 
cause it is directed, not to man's temporal, but to 
his eternal, well-being, not to his political, but to 
his spiritual, good. Certainly, we need not look be- 
yond the borders of our own land to see the truth 
signally exemplified, that civil and social order 
has no friend more serviceable than the Christian 
preacher and pastor who devotes himself to the 
duties of his sacred office, refusing to intermeddle 
with political questions ; while here as everywhere 
the political priest, the partisan preacher, is a 
disquieter of public peace, a disturber of civil 
society. In other words, Christianity is service- 



vi.] To Civil Society. 213 

able to the State when it is neither obtruded nor 
drafted into the service of the State, but is left 
free to work in its own sphere, with its own agen- 
cies, and for its own proper ends. The moment 
it is thrust out of its own proper domain, and 
made to do duty as a political instrumentality, its 
dignity is debased, its beneficence is abolished. 
And the reason of this lies in the nature of things. 
For the proper spheres of religion and politics are 
essentially different. Political Christianity is a 
contradiction of terms. Christianity abdicates its 
high function, and lays aside its crown, when it 
enters the arena of political strife. Nay, more, 
it then becomes an instrument of enormous evil. 
It is not at all strange, that the very worst politi- 
cal despotisms have been the despotisms of 
ecclesiastical ministries and cabals, and that the 
weakest and most unworthy rulers of the world 
have been priest-ridden kings. For Christianity, 
degraded or perverted into the service of this 
world, is found to be unfit to do even this world 
service. It is like a fallen angel, which, ceasing 
to be the messenger of unearthly good, becomes 
the instrument of unearthly evil. 

The same limitation, arising out of the very 



214 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

nature of things, renders it impossible for the 
State to wisely and beneficently interfere with re- 
ligion. Large as is the debt of gratitude which 
civil society owes to Christianity, it cannot recom- 
pense it. The benefit which Christianity bestows 
on the State is a free gift, which cannot be repaid. 
The moment the State attempts to do this, either 
by patronage or by any kind of sanction or aid, it 
hinders and obstructs the proper work of Chris- 
tianity. For Christianity deals with man as a free 
personality. As the grace which it announces 
and conveys is a free gift, so it must be freely 
apprehended and freely received by the soul to 
whom its overtures are addressed. External force 
can accomplish nothing. It was deliberately 
renounced and rejected by Christ as of no value 
in the kingdom of souls. The benefits of religion 
cannot be imposed by human enactment. Divine 
grace cannot be administered by human law. 
The might of embattled legions, the retinues of 
princes, the pageantry of courts, are worse than 
powerless to help forward the work of Christ; 
and all that States can do is equally useless for 
the same reason. For, the moment the State 
undertakes to deal with religious interests, it 



vi.] To Civil Society. 215 

passes out of its proper sphere, and becomes 
a tyranny or an impertinence. Being merely a 
human instrumentality, organized and maintained 
to serve temporal and secular ends ; confessedly 
unable to control any thing more than external 
conduct, — the only influence it can exert on con- 
science is either to oppress or debauch it. Nor is 
this all. Just as works cannot produce faith, but 
faith must produce acceptable works ; so all at- 
tempts on the part of the State to assist Chris- 
tianity by any methods which it can employ begin 
at the wrong end, so to speak, and work in the 
wrong direction, not with the course of grace, but 
against it. It is not too much to say, that the 
State cannot help Christianity. Whenever it has 
attempted so to do, it has inflicted an injury. It 
was not for nothing that Christ refused to even seem 
in any degree to solicit the favor or accept the pat- 
ronage of the Roman civil power. Though in no 
sense antagonized to the Caesar, yet he well knew 
that the Caesar could send no legions to help him in 
the battle that lay before him. The kingdoms of 
this world cannot lend their powers to aid the un- 
seen forces which exploit in the kingdom of God. 
The most that the State can do to assist Chris- 



216 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

tianity is, to refrain from interfering with it, and 
to protect it from all similar interference. The 
duty of protection may be "put on the same 
ground on which the prevention of disturbance 
is put in any other case where men are gathered 
in lawful assemblies." "The disturbance may 
proceed from enemies without, or ill-disposed 
persons within, the assembly. In either case it 
may be reformed by ordinary police regulations." * 
Manifestly, the extension of such protection is 
merely a civic duty, and does not in any way 
exceed the State's proper function, or constitute 
an intrusion into the proper domain of religion. 
The same may be said of all enactments which 
are intended to suppress or prevent crimes against 
religion, such as laws against sacrilege and blas- 
phemy, and for the quiet observance of the Lord's 
Day. So far as these have a bearing on civil and 
social order, they are the legitimate subjects of 
civic enactment ; but, so far as they relate to reli- 
gion, the function of the State is strictly limited 
to the duty of protecting religion from such inter- 
ference as would hinder or obstruct the free and 
proper exercise of it. The right of the State to 

1 Woolsey's Political Science, ii. 505. 



vi.] To Civil Society. 217 

deal with the property interests of religious cor- 
porations rests on the same grounds. Just in so 
far as the Christian Church deals with and em- 
ploys the things over which the State has jurisdic- 
tion, it is entitled to ask of the State the protec- 
tion of those things, and must submit them to the 
necessary and legitimate control of the State. 1 

The principles hitherto laid down enable us to 
determine by what method all conflicts between 
Church and State ought to be adjusted. We have 
seen that the two cannot rightly come in conflict. 
The one is a theocracy, under the rule of its divine 
Founder and living Governor. The other is a 
democracy, responsible to the people. The proper 
domain of each is wholly distinct from the other; 
there being but one term of relation, and but one 
point of contact ; and that is, the individual soul. 
If, however, through mistaken or evil intent, the 
one be thrust into the domain of the other, the 
invaded interest is entitled to resist, and to rectify 
the frontier so to speak. Howbeit, each must 
resist with means and agencies appropriate to 
itself. The Church is -not entitled to use force 
or to appeal to force. The Founder of Chris- 

1 Compare Woolsey's Political Science, vol. ii. pp. 506-508. 



218 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

tianity himself determined this question in Pilate's 
judgment-hall, when he said, " My kingdom is not 
of this world : if my kingdom were of this world, 
then would my servants fight, that I should not 
be delivered to the Jews : but now is my kingdom 
not from hence ; " and again when he said, " Put up 
again thy sword into his place : for all they that 
take the sword shall perish with the sword." Nor, 
on the other hand, is the State competent to wield 
spiritual weapons. Nevertheless, from the nature 
and necessity of the case, the State must be sov- 
ereign in its own sphere ; and, therefore, from its 
decisions in regard to the bounds and limitations 
of its jurisdiction, there can be no appeal to any 
higher earthly kingdom or authority, since there 
is no higher. The Church is not a kingdom of 
this world, and has no jurisdiction in earthly mat- 
ters. If, therefore, it ever should come to pass, 
as it often has in by-gone times, and as it notably 
did at the bar of Pontius Pilate, that the civil 
power should undertake to oppress or to smite 
the Church of God, the illustrious example of 
sacrifice is set for the Church to follow. The 
divine method of resisting encroachment and 
wrong, and of overcoming it, which Christ has 



vi.] To Civil Society. 219 

commended for his Church to follow, is, not to 
appeal to force, nor to temporize and make terms 
with power, but is patiently to do the things which 
God commands, and, if need be, to die. 

That there have been such conflicts in the past 
does not need to be stated. That such are even 
now impending has been pointed out. Though 
the evil of these, as we believe, may be largely 
neutralized ; yet we dare not hope that we shall 
altogether escape, either the conflict or the evil. 
Much will depend upon the diffusion and accept- 
ance of true views of the essential relation be- 
tween Christianity and civil society. Much will 
depend, we venture to think, upon the influence 
which this Church shall exert as the historic and 
ethnic Church of this people, and as the single 
consistent upholder of the true authority of both 
Church and State ; as the one teacher of the essen- 
tial difference which divides them, and of the one 
relation which they sustain to each other. Should 
such ideas as this Church consistently and appro- 
priately holds prevail, then we believe that a noble 
career in the domain, both of civil and religious 
liberty, lies before the people of this land. We 
believe, that while the distinction between Church 



220 The Relation of Christianity [Lect. 

and State would not be obliterated, but would, on 
the contrary, be more exactly denned, the apparent 
antagonisms, the actual contradictions, the possible 
conflicts, between them would become more and 
more rare, until they would cease altogether. We 
believe that each, acting freely in its own sphere, 
would support the other ; religion strengthening 
the State by re-enforcing and dignifying the bonds 
which hold society together, and society cherish- 
ing religion as the great conservator of public 
peace and social order. Nevertheless, the condi- 
tion is, that both must be permitted to act freely, 
each in its own sphere ; the one being a kingdom 
of this world, the other a kingdom not of this 
world. The distinction between them lies in the 
nature of things, and shall not be abrogated till 
the new heavens and the new earth shall appear, 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. 

It would be easy, perhaps, to indulge in optim- 
istic anticipations, to prognosticate the growing 
harmonies, which, under the influence of the prin- 
ciples here laid down, shall charm away disorder 
in the world's fair future. But the, thought which 
fills my own mind and heart, as I bring these lec- 
tures to a close, is, not of the Church's triumph, 



vi.] To Civil Society. 221 

but of the Church's responsibility. If, indeed, the 
conclusions which we have reached are right, then 
the Church must do her work in the old way : 
there is no better. She must jealously guard 
against all worldly ambition. Her clergy must de- 
pend, not on their rank, or their state, or their pre- 
rogative ; not on the positions of worldly influence, 
which are more and more temptingly held out to 
them, — but on the humility, the fidelity, the single- 
heartedness, with which they minister to the souls 
of men the things which belong to their peace. 
They must be content to be less and less men of 
the world, and more and more men of God. More- 
over, the short and easy methods of official con- 
trol, and of all kinds of mere institutionalism in 
education and charity, must be renounced ; and 
a return must be had to the quiet, unobtrusive, 
patient methods of Christian nurture, domestic 
religion, and pastoral work in the homes and at 
the firesides of the people. Let us not deceive 
ourselves. The path of duty here indicated is 
arduous and unwelcome to the natural man. There 
are manifold temptations of ease, of pride, of sloth, 
to beguile us from it. The hearty acceptance of 
it would dismiss the Church for a time from that 



222 The Relation of Christianity. [Lect. vl] 

observation of men which, I fear, we are learning 
greatly to love : even as, in time of war, the promul- 
gation of marching-orders breaks up dress-parades, 
and lays pomp and circumstance aside ; while the 
battalions march in silence to the front to engage 
the enemy. To the more heroic but more obscure, 
to the more effective but less ostentatious, work 
and warfare of encountering evil in the human 
heart, of meeting it with spiritual weapons on the 
battle-field of the soul, of ministering to human 
needs and human helplessness, not merely in the 
temples of religion, but in the sanctuary of the 
home, the Church is now called by the obvious needs 
of the day and time ; by the golden opportunities of 
the hour ; by the richer promise of the future ; - by 
the secret motions of the Spirit ; by the trumpet- 
call of our Leader and King, who, as he moves in 
the van of human progress, summons his Church 
away from the strifes and contentions of this world's 
kingdoms to a nobler contest and a diviner service 
in the cause of truth and for the kingdom of truth, 
the establishment of which alone works true and 
lasting good to man, — a good so true and so last- 
ing, that it shall endure long after this world with 
all its kingdoms shall have passed away. 



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